President Joe Biden is asking U.S. governors to enhance their readiness to confront potential Russian cyberattacks by tightening oversight of their states’ critical infrastructure, putting their experts on high alert and developing incident response plans.
“Much of our nation’s critical infrastructure is privately owned and overseen at the state and local levels,” Biden wrote in previously unreported letters to the nation’s governors and the mayor of Washington, D.C., one of which POLITICO obtained. “I urge you to take urgent action to exercise the authority you and your team have to prepare your critical infrastructure to withstand a cyberattack.”
In his March 18 letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Biden wrote that “there are things that only you as governor can do to secure your state’s computer systems, your critical infrastructure, your citizens, and through those efforts, our nation.”
Figure out where you stand: In the letters, Biden encouraged the governors and D.C.’s mayor to convene their top security officials and discuss the resilience of their critical infrastructure.
“Do you have the authority to set and enforce cybersecurity baseline standards for the utilities in your state, and if so, have you done it?” Biden wrote. “Has your chief information security officer done all that he or she can do to lock down your state’s systems and put your cybersecurity teams on high alert?”
Working with regulators: State leaders should work with their local public utility commissions to enforce “minimum cybersecurity standards” for the operators of vital infrastructure, Biden said. If state governments or independent regulators have the authority to require infrastructure companies to “take emergency cybersecurity measures,” he added, they should do so now “in light of the current conflict.”
Follow my lead: Biden also urged state governments to follow cyber best practices he already required the federal government to implement in a May 2021 executive order. These include periodic exercises, prompt security patching, mandatory multifactor authentication, robust backups and widespread data encryption.
Let us help you: CISA offers free cybersecurity services and online guidance for state and local officials, Biden wrote, and the federal infrastructure law includes “$350 billion in emergency funding … that may be used on cybersecurity, including modernization of hardware and software,” along with $1 billion in state and local cyber grants and $3 billion in modernization and security funding for electric utilities.
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By: Eric Geller
Title: Biden tells governors to 'take urgent action' to protect infrastructure from Russian hackers
Sourced From: www.politico.com/news/2022/03/23/biden-governors-infrastructure-russian-hackers-00019647
Published Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2022 12:01:52 EST
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