Democratic senators address DHS over cybersecurity funding shortfall

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), along with U.S. Sens. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Maggie Hassan (D-NH), send a letter Tuesday to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to address a shortfall in funding efforts meant to support state and local data sharing and cybersecurity.

The currently proposed budget for the DHS would cut funding for the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) by $4.6 million. At the same time, DHS has asked the Center for Internet Security to take on the duties of the Election Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC). Both proposals caught at least one state official off guard — New Hampshire Information Technology Commissioner Denis Goulet, who raised concerns with Hassan.

“As you know, State, Local, Territorial and Tribal (SLTT) entities have been consistently targeted by malicious hackers,” the senators wrote to Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the DHS. “Recently, across the nation, our cities and states have suffered from debilitating ransomware attacks that are carried out to extort public funds…Local governments – including small towns, counties, and school districts – simply do not have the budgets, the personnel, or the expertise necessary to deploy sophisticated tools in order to defend themselves against this evolving threat environment.”

The senators noted that these programs have historically been prime examples of a partnership-based approach to building resilience and defense, ensuring communication between federal, state, and local entities, as well as threat monitoring. At the same time, they cited recent findings from internet, real-time threat intelligence company Recorded Future, which found that state and local governments have been hit by 230 cyberattacks from 2013 through September 2019, with 81 occurring this year.

Previously, the Senate Appropriations Committee had recommended an appropriation of $1 billion for the account that would fund these programs and other cybersecurity efforts in Fiscal Year 2020.