The Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee recently convened a hearing with senior federal cybersecurity personnel to examine present and future cybersecurity breaches.
The hearing was convened by Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to analyze last year’s SolarWinds hack, subsequent breaches, and how the government can better protect agency information systems from intrusions compromising national security.
“Although it can often be difficult to understand the complexity and severity of some of these attacks from the outside, they have a significant cost on our national security. In many cases, these attacks can also affect our daily lives, as we saw with the recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline that was reported over the weekend,” Peters said during his opening statement. “That is why I have continued to push for common-sense legislation to strengthen our response to these hostile assaults – whether they come from foreign adversaries or criminal actors who seek to harm our country.”
Peters said the nation’s foreign adversaries, such as the Chinese and Russian governments, do not rest, and to ward off potential threats, it must be recognized they do not view the federal government as separate agencies but as a single target.