WASHINGTON – In testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection, global tech trade association 91proÊÓÆµ’s Senior Vice President of Policy and General Counsel John Miller urged lawmakers to renew the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015, also known as CISA 15. Miller’s testimony highlighted how a failure to renew CISA 15 would create uncertainty for U.S. national security, unnecessarily weaken its cybersecurity posture, and undermine the significant progress made over the past decade to build trusted information sharing relationships between the public and private sectors.
Miller called on Congress to deliver a clean extension of CISA 15 ahead of its sunset date in September to ensure continuity and avoid disruptions at the federal, state, and local levels that would empower malicious actors with new opportunities to exploit vulnerabilities.
“A failure to renew CISA 15 could be interpreted by malicious actors as the U.S. ‘dropping its guard’ and would be an unforced error in a dangerous and evolving moment of cyber risk for the U.S. The lapse of CISA 15 would remove the legal protections underlying the trust mechanisms and relationships that underpin the cyber threat information sharing that is fundamental to our collective cyber defense. The one guarantee of a lapse in the CISA 15 authority is that attackers would be in a better position to capitalize on any resulting confusion and uncertainty caused by a lapse in CISA 15,” Miller testified.
Read John Miller’s full testimony here.
Watch the full Committee hearing, In Defense of Defensive Measures: Reauthorizing Cybersecurity Information Sharing Activities that Underpin U.S. National Cyber Defense .