As the U.S. government grapples with what some are calling the worst cyber breach in years, lawmakers are pressing President Trump to sign sweeping new cybersecurity provisions contained in this year’s National Defense Authorization Act. Two lawmakers who worked on the provisions said that the recently disclosed hack shows how vulnerable the U.S. continues to be to adversaries like Russia.
The bad news out of the SolarWinds hack has become like a dripping faucet. Daily, the world learns of another agency or government body that may have been affected in what many call the worst cyber intelligence breach in years by Russia.
“I can’t share with you anything that’s classified but what we know is that this was a really serious breach,” Sen. Angus King, I-ME, said on Thursday during a Defense One Outlook 2021 event. “This is a warning shot of all warning shots to tell us how vulnerable we are and how serious the consequences should be. We have to double down on cyber defense, if there was ever any doubt it’s been resolved over the last two or three days.”
As described by King, the U.S. government’s cyber defense posture suffers some of the same shortcomings that the nation’s counter-terrorism apparatus faced before 9/11, including a lack of coordination on intelligence. “One of the problems we tried to address [in this year’s NDAA] in a big way is the silo problem. I want to say, we have really good silos — but they’re still silos,” he said.
