Biden signs a pair of cybersecurity bills into law
President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed into law two pieces of legislation that will enhance cyber coordination with state and local governments and strengthen the federal cyber workforce, the White House announced.
The measures are the latest attempt by policymakers to tackle the fallout from the massive SolarWinds hack and the high-profile ransomware attacks on the Colonial Pipeline and others that marked 2021.
The bipartisan State and Local Government Cybersecurity Act will allow the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to offer state and local actors access to upgrade digital security tools and procedures. It also boosts the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center to help prevent and respond to future digital incidents.
The president also signed off on the bipartisan Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce Program Act, which establishes a rotational cyber workforce development program across several government agencies in an effort to compete with the usually more lucrative private sector.
The program would allow cybersecurity professionals to rotate through the federal government’s civilian agencies to sample jobs, giving them new skills in different departments and exposing them to unique cyberspace dangers, such as foreign adversaries or criminal organizations looking to disrupt the nation’s networks.
Martin Matishak
is the senior cybersecurity reporter for The Record. Prior to joining Recorded Future News in 2021, he spent more than five years at Politico, where he covered digital and national security developments across Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence community. He previously was a reporter at The Hill, National Journal Group and Inside Washington Publishers.