Homeland Security gets behind cyber sharing bill

[Disir]

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson has thrown his support behind controversial cybersecurity legislation under consideration in the Senate.

The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) would shield companies from legal liability when sharing cyber threat data with the government.

It faces opposition from a variety of privacy advocates and tech groups who say the bill would unnecessarily funnel personal information to the federal government and weaken security overall.

“Now is the opportunity for the Congress, in bipartisan fashion, to better protect the cybersecurity for the American people and their government; it is an opportunity we cannot afford to lose,” Johnson said in a statement late Thursday. “As currently written, I support this bill.”
Johnson’s announcement came less than an hour after the White House tendered its formal support for the legislation.

The Obama administration has been informally on board with CISA since August, when White House spokesman Eric Schultz called on the upper chamber to swiftly move the bill.

Johnson’s agency stands to have significant responsibility for any threat indicators shared with the federal government should the bill pass.

For many privacy and security opponents of the bill, the sticking point was what information would be shared and how.

A series of tweaks and alterations, many of which have been combined into a manager’s amendment package expected to pass next week, attempt to mitigate those concerns.

Under provisions in the package, shared data would be funneled through the DHS to be “scrubbed” of personally identifiable information.
Homeland Security gets behind cyber sharing bill

S.754 - 114th Congress (2015-2016): Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015

Ya, I mean.........send that information right down to Homeland security and let them "scrub it".

Morons.

Stop the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act | EFF Action Center

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd forgot to pay the light bill an' when the power went out Granny thought the jihadis was at the doorstep...

Could IS Turn Next to Cyber War?
December 18, 2015 - The power is out. Gas stations are out of gas. Factories are going haywire.

It sounds like an action movie, but some analysts tell VOA that U.S. industries need to significantly ramp up their cyber security or risk having the Islamic State (IS) hack, attack and create mayhem inside their systems. "This is definitely a threat to the U.S. government and other western governments, but also to our industrial control systems — the ones that run our manufacturing plants, moving energy across the country, that have vulnerabilities," said Bob Gourley, the former chief technology officer of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Hackers who say they are loyal to the Islamic State group, take over the U.S. Central Command Twitter account​

Unlike cyberattacks by Russia and China, Gourley said, groups like IS are less interested in just extracting information and more interested in disrupting essential systems. "They are going to want to cause mischief and grab attention, so destroying equipment or changing information that makes us question our own systems," said Gourley, who heads the firm Cognitio and is publisher of ThreatBrief.com. As yet, he added, IS militants are not as capable as some criminal networks or rival nations, "but IS has more capabilities that any other terrorist organization that I know of. And they can gain more."

Protecting government systems

So far, IS has established itself as a leader in using Internet-based communications and social media to both send encrypted information and recruit thousands of people from more than 80 countries around the world. "We are in a new age of this threat," Gourley said, "and the most important thing is we need to defend our systems better than they are currently being defended."

This screen grab from an Islamic State group-affiliated Twitter account, taken Sept. 20, 2014, purports to show a military commander handing a flower to a child while visiting southern Iraq. The group is a leader in using Internet-based communications.​

Clifton Triplett, recently named the Office of Personnel Management's senior cyber and information technology adviser, said he is already working to limit any kind of IS breach into the government department. "I think what I have to do is … assume that, at some point in time, they may be successful," Triplett said at a conference organized by Bloomberg Government. "So how do I minimize the impact of their success? Right now, that really comes into access control." OPM suffered a major hack earlier in 2015, resulting in the disclosure of private information of some 21.5 million people, including those who applied for security clearances.

Anticipating IS

See also:

Bangladesh Muslim Leaders Move to Counter Islamist Militants
December 18, 2015 — Police in Bangladesh are tapping Islamic scholars and clerics to combat the rise of Islamist militancy in the country. The religious leaders are drafting a fatwa, or edict, condemning the activities of the Islamic State and Bangladeshi Islamist militant groups as "un-Islamic."

"The fatwa is to be jointly signed off by 100,000 Islamic scholars from across the country,” said Maulana Fariduddin Masoud, chairman of Bangladesh Jamiatul Ulama, or BJU, a national body of Islamic scholars in the country. “It identifies IS and its local Islamist militant supporters — who are killing people and indulging in terrorist activities in Bangladesh and elsewhere — as not just the 'enemies of Islam' but also 'enemies of the Muslims.’ “

A fighter with the Islamic State distributes a copy of the Quran, Islam's holy book, to a driver in Mosul, Iraq, June 22, 2014. Islamic scholars in Bangladesh are denouncing activities of the Islamic State.​

BJU has taken the lead role in mobilizing the clerics and scholars for the fatwa. The group is training the country's tens of thousands of mosque leaders "in an effort to take the campaign against the Islamist militants to the grass-roots level," Masoud said. "Through their khutbas [sermons], the mosque leaders will explain to the people how IS and other Islamists are resorting to violence and acting against the tenets of the Quran and the Hadith," he said.

Following a meeting with the leader of the BJU at the police headquarters in Dhaka on Thursday, Inspector General AKM Shahidul Hoque approved the BJU's plan to counter IS and other groups with the fatwa and the campaign using the mosques. "Some groups are misinterpreting Islam's teachings and spreading militancy and violence in the country,” Hoque said. “We are hopeful that our clerics will succeed to counter these subversive forces with their special campaign through the Friday sermons at the mosques and other Islamic programs.”

Violent attacks