New Cyber Security Legislation

This evening Chairman Thomson (D, MS), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee sent out a press release on new cyber security legislation introduced today. The press release describes a comprehensive piece of legislation that establishes a DHS Office of Cybersecurity & Communications and a “Cybersecurity Compliance Division to oversee the establishment of performance-based standards responsive to the particular risks to the .gov domain and critical infrastructure networks”.

Interestingly the term ‘information networks’ is not used in this press release or in the accompanying one page summary document. Of course, neither is there any specific mention of control systems either. I suspect that this bill would apply to both, but until I can see a copy of the actual legislation, I won’t know for sure.

I won’t know the bill number until today’s Congressional Record is published tomorrow morning. The bill itself may (if it is very short) or may not (if this is truly a comprehensive bill it will be long) be available tomorrow morning. Watch this space for additional information.