Bills Introduced – 04-21-17

Yesterday both the House and Senate met in proforma session. There were twelve bills introduced in the House while the vast majority (probably only three in attendance) remained in their home districts campaigning, raising money and meeting with constituents (Senate rules do not allow introduction of bills during proforma sessions). Of these, only two may be of specific interest to readers of this blog:

HR 2105 To require the Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology to disseminate guidance to help reduce small business cybersecurity risks, and for other purposes. Rep. Webster, Daniel [R-FL-11]

HR 2114 To require the Secretary of the Treasury to implement security measures in the electronic tax return filing process to prevent tax refund fraud from being perpetrated with electronic identity theft. Rep. Yoho, Ted S. [R-FL-3] 

It will be interesting to see what form the ‘disseminate guidance’ will take and what additional guidance (over and above the already existing guidance documents) will be required. I really do not expect that the guidance will include industrial control system guidance though it almost certainly should (IMHO).

I will only be mentioning HR 2114 in this blog post. I mention it to remind readers how long it takes Congress to react to real problems. Brian Krebs first wrote about this problem in 2015, so the problem has been around for a while now. To be fair Yoho introduced an earlier version of this bill in the 114^th Congress (HR 1595) but there was no action taken on that bill even though it ultimately had 33 bipartisan cosponsors. I expect a similar fate this session.