Should the Government Legislate Cybersecurity for Private Business?

Yesterday I joined Dana Barrett for her Biz 1190 AM radio show. The primary topic of our conversation was the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), which passed by 74-21 vote in the U.S. Senate last week. A bi-partisan bill, CISA is favored on both sides of the political fence, but outside of Washington opinion is mixed surrounding its ability to protect consumers’ privacy while providing actionable information.

The idea behind the legislation is simple and seems on the surface like a no-brainer: Let private businesses share information with each other and the government in real time, such that by accumulating all this data we should have a better understanding of cybersecurity threats and be able to react to them more quickly.

What we’re talking about here is not just a couple of guys in dorm rooms, nor is it even a couple of guys in Romania – Countries’ governments are fighting and we have to expect that our government is going to become involved. Having the U.S. Government sit on the sidelines for years now and not getting any type of regulation approved is a mistake for all of us.

Yet the real problem revolves around people: The people who can help companies better protect themselves by sifting through the data, understanding it, and turning it into something actionable. As a country we have a real problem developing cybersecurity professionals. There are currently 200,000+ job openings in the cybersecurity world and that’s predicted to grow to 1.5 million by 2019.

Business and government do need to work together and this bill is a good first step. Listen to a clip from The Dana Barrett Show discussion here.

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