NEW CYBER BILL

House Homeland Security Committee ranking member John Katko (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) on Tuesday introduced legislation to help the federal government identify and further protect certain critical groups from cyberattacks.

The Securing Systemically Important Critical Infrastructure Act would authorize the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to establish a process to designate groups as systemically important critical infrastructure (SICI).

CISA would be required to work with sector risk management agencies to establish the criteria around what organizations qualify as SICI, and ensure CISA gives owners and operators of these key groups access to priority cybersecurity programs.

“In recent months, we have collaborated extensively with industry to codify a transparent, well-understood, stakeholder-involved process for identifying SICI,” Katko said in a statement Tuesday. “Our goal is to understand the single points of failure and layers of systemic risk in our economy, because if everything is critical, nothing is.”