CISA’s budgetsince its inception. It got $1.7 billion in its first year in fiscal 2018, and is on course for more than $2.9 billion in fiscal 2023. Cyber spending has increased elsewhere, too. Republicans in charge of either chamber might want to take a closer look at that.
“It’s fair to say that when it comes to cybersecurity, you have seen both authorities and budgets of agencies handling cybersecurity grow over the last several years,”, a partner at the lobbying firm Monument Policy who has tech clients, told me. “Assuming Republicans take the House, they will certainly conduct rigorous oversight from both the appropriations and authorization perspective. If Republicans also take the Senate, expect that to happen there, too.
A senior CISA official said the agency was aware that potential distributed denial-of-service attacks — in which a flood of malicious internet traffic overwhelms a website — affected some websites belonging to state election offices and political campaigns. One such DDoS attack knocked down the Mississippi secretary of state’s office, for example. The websites were usually quickly restored, an official said.
Bad news for insecure people.