Cybersecurity
Congress Must Avoid ‘Overly Prescriptive’ Incident Reporting To Avoid Missing Larger Cyberattacks
Too many reports could burden federal officials, said the executive director of the Alliance for Digital Innovation.

WASHINGTON, January 11, 2022 — The executive director of an organization that pushes information technology reform in government testified Tuesday in front of the House Oversight committee that any incident reporting requirements that Congress is considering should not burden officials so much that they end up missing more serious breaches of cybersecurity.
Ross Nodurft of the Alliance for Digital Innovation told lawmakers studying the reform of the Federal Information Security Management Act, a 2002 law which implements an information security and protection program, that the amended legislation should consider keeping Congress abreast of incidents, but should be mindful of how it defines a security problem.
“As Congress considers defining major incidents or codifying vulnerability response policies, any legislation should be mindful of the dynamic nature of responding to cybersecurity challenges facing government networks,” Nodurft said. “If Congress is overly prescriptive in its definition of an incident, it runs the risk of receiving so many notifications that the incidents which are truly severe are missed or effectively drowned out due to thee frequency of reporting,” he said in prepared remarks.
The comments come on the heels of a year that included major cybersecurity attacks, including the attacks on software company SolarWinds, oil transport company Colonial Pipeline, which prompted a Senate hearing on the matter. The House Oversight committee released details of its investigation into some of the breaches in November.
The comments also come after lawmakers proposed new reporting requirements on companies. Those proposed laws would make it mandatory that small and large companies report incidents to the government so they can best prepare a response to protect Americans.
In July, Sens. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and Susan Collins, R-Maine, introduced the Cyber Incident Notification Act of 2021, which requires federal and private sector cybersecurity intrusions to be reported to the government within 24 hours.
Cyber incident reporting was recently left out of a Senate bipartisan version of the National Defense Authorization Act.
Lead cybersecurity officials in government have been calling for mandatory breach reporting to government. Brandon Wales, executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the same Oversight committee in November that Congress should force companies to share that kind of information. Last summer, a Department of Justice official said he supports mandatory breach reporting.
In October, Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the department intends to create a new cyber bureau to help tackle the growing challenge of cyber warfare.
Agency roles should be clarified
Rep. Debbie Schultz, D-Florida, talked about the varied organizations and institutions in her state that have been affected by cyberattacks and threats, including the Miami-based software company Kaseya, which experienced a major ransomware attack.
Schultz stated that there are two entities that are critical to federal cybersecurity: the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the Office of the National Cyber Director.
Grant Schneider, senior director of cybersecurity services, Venable, said that the Office of the National Cyber Director acts as a conductor in the framework of FISMA. These organizations work with other organizations, such as the National Institute of Standards and Technologies, and the Office of Management and Budget.
With so many organizations, Nodurft explained how important it is for the roles within these organizations to be defined. He talked about how important it is for agencies to know where to turn to report cyberattacks. In part with this, he continued, agencies who “are proactively trying to mitigate their cyber risks” need clear reporting channels and clear areas of jurisdiction to go to for various issues.
According to Nodurft, these defined roles would “make it much easier for [agencies] to work together, to build a broader defensive structure.”
Cybersecurity
Large Telecoms Pitch Strike Force for Internet Traffic Security Over Global Gateway
Verizon, AT&T and Lumen warned about prescriptive rules that could diminish security.

WASHINGTON, February 23, 2023 – Verizon, AT&T and Lumen Technologies have proposed that the Federal Communications Commission adopt and lead a strike force consisting of various industry, government and international participants to come up with policy mechanisms to secure internet traffic over the global gateway.
The proposals are particular to the border gateway protocol, which is how global traffic is routed. The problem is that there are no security features to ensure trust of the information being routed, according to the FCC, which opened a proceeding on the matter on February 28 last year asking for commentary on what to do about the issue. The concern is that without security measures, bad network actors can redirect traffic to itself instead of the intended recipient, which exposes Americans to the theft of identity, extortion, financial transactions, and state spying, the commission noted.
In the letter last week, the three telecommunications companies proposed that secure internet traffic routing practices over the border gateway protocol first focus on critical infrastructure entities in the United States and its allies to allow these telecommunications companies to protect the traffic routes via filtering.
The filtering would involve registering traffic origins and identifying where to filter traffic along the route, including at interconnection peering points and customer routers. The proposed strike force would involve Big Tech companies and cloud platforms, which the FCC asked if it should include in its original proceeding document, as they have networking equipment and BGP routers. The internet service providers, who have their own filtering practices, also floated the possibility of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency requiring other agencies to provide that information.
The proposal also includes “collaborative assurances” in which the ISPs would provide confidential technical briefings about the practices.
But they advise against the FCC making prescriptive rules about such practices, noting that different ISPs have different approaches by design, and that any onerous approach could jeopardize security, not bolster it.
Questions about FCC’s jurisdiction over a fundamentally global internet routing system
The trio also questioned the jurisdiction of the commission on the routing ecosystem, which is fundamentally global.
“Asserting prescriptive regulatory control over internet protocols could have cascading effects, prompting international regulators – and authoritarian regimes in general – to seek greater internet control at the global level through” the United Nation’s telecommunications regulatory, the International Telecommunication Union.
“This would create barriers to U.S. leadership in the global digital economy and U.S. national security and is directly contrary to core interests of the United States and our free market democratic allies,” they added.
The FCC’s notice came just days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which resulted in reports of increased cyberattacks from the warring regions. In fact, the FCC accused Russian network operators of inexplicably routing traffic through its country, including from traffic from Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and major credit card companies MasterCard and Visa.
It also came before a law was passed that requires critical infrastructure companies to report to the federal government within a certain timeframe when they have experienced a hack or breach, as the country grapples with a number of high-profile attacks since the pandemic began.
The FCC has targeted national security threats by halting license authorizations to Chinese firms and putting on a blacklist a number of companies whose equipment American telecommunications companies are expected to remove from their networks.
Cybersecurity
Smaller Companies Facing Cybersecurity Insurance Headwinds: Equifax Executive
Cost of insurance for cybersecurity could be a problem for smaller companies.

WASHINGTON, February 15, 2023 – Smaller companies may face increasing cybersecurity insurance costs as the market evolves, warned an executive at credit bureau company Equifax.
Cybersecurity insurance will be extraordinarily important for small-to-medium-sized businesses, said Jamil Farshchi, executive vice president and chief information security officer. But premium cybersecurity insurance coverage has increased in recent years, with many small-to-medium-sized businesses relying on that cybersecurity insurance to keep them safe.
“These are small businesses that don’t have the resources that larger organizations do,” Farshchi said. “So I worry as the insurance market evolves, the premiums and the coverage levels are getting such that is very difficult.”
Equifax was a victim of one of the country’s most infamous breaches, when in 2017 the data of 147 million Americans were stolen by hackers. The company settled for hundreds of millions of dollars with the Federal Trade Commission.
Experts have urged companies to assume that any outside program is vulnerable to hacking, a position known as “zero trust.” This way, they can take the necessary measures to address the attack.
The United States has been on heightened alert when it comes to cybersecurity issues. Over the last two years, a number of high-profile cybersecurity breaches have impacted a software company, an oil transporter, and a meat producer. Those cybersecurity problems have triggered legislation that requires that the federal government be alerted when critical industries suffer such breaches.
After Russia invaded Ukraine early last year, a number of cybersecurity hacks emerged from those countries, according to an Atlas VPN report shortly after the invasion.
Cybersecurity
CES 2023: Consumers Need to Understand Personal Cybersecurity, Says White House Cyber Official
Consumers must better understand how to weigh risks and protect themselves in the digital world, said Camille Stewart Gloster.

LAS VEGAS, January 7, 2023 – In addition to building a more robust cybersecurity workforce, policymakers should consider consumer education, said Camille Stewart Gloster, deputy national cyber director for technology and ecosystem for the White House, speaking Saturday at the Consumer Electronics Show.
CES 2023 has featured numerous discussions of cybersecurity in sectors ranging from transportation to Internet of Things home devices. On Thursday, an official from the Department of Homeland Security argued that manufactures should design and pre-configure devices to be secure, thus reducing the security burden on consumers.
For their own protection, consumers must better understand how to weigh risks and protect themselves in the digital world, Stewart Gloster said Saturday. “The sooner that people understand that their physical security and digital security are inextricably linked the better,” she argued. According to the panel’s moderator, Consumer Technology Association senior manager for government affairs John Mitchell, 82 percent of data breaches in 2021 involved “the human element, stolen credentials, phishing, misuse.”
Stewart Gloster’s team is working on a national cyber-workforce and education strategy, she said, which will address the federal cyber workforce, the national cyber workforce, cyber education, and “digital safety awareness.”
Stewart Gloster said workforce initiatives should promote the participation of “people of a diverse set of backgrounds who are highly skilled and multidisciplinary who can take a look at the problem space, who can apply their lived experiences, apply the things they’ve observed, apply their academic backgrounds to a challenging and ever evolving landscape.”
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