For 35 days, former high-ranking feds and Congress publicly warned about the potential negative ramifications of the partial shutdown on federal cybersecurity initiatives. Now with a short-term spending deal in place, many on Capitol Hill are shifting focus towards sifting through the wreckage to determine just how much damage was actually done. House Homeland Security Committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) said earlier this month that DHS and Congress “will be dealing with the consequences of [the shutdown] for months — or even years — to come.” At the Jan. 29 State of the Net conference in Washington D.C., Moira Bergin, subcommittee director for the House Homeland subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection listed a number of cybersecurity initiatives at DHS — from pipeline security to botnets to election security and activities at the new National Risk Management Center — that simply stopped during the shutdown.
Bergin said the shutdown, coming just over a month after Congress passed a long-awaited reorganization law for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, “couldn’t have happened at a less opportune time.”
“I think there’s concern among our members about cascading effects of the lost time and strategic planning,” said Bergin. “We learned yesterday that there’s a [monetary] cost to the shutdown, but really the loss is the month we can’t get back.”
A spokesperson for the committee told FCW earlier this month that members plan to use oversight hearings to further press DHS and Trump administration officials on the question in the future.
Full Article: What was the cybersecurity impact of the shutdown? — FCW.