CompTIA Participates in House Small Business Committee Hearing on Cyber-Security

Yesterday the House Subcommittee on Health and Technology held a hearing titled “Protecting Small Businesses Against Emerging and Complex Cyber-Attacks.”

CompTIA’s own Dan Shapero, founder of ClikCloud, participated on a panel comprised of the following speakers:

• William H. Weber, senior vice president, general counsel, Cbeyond, Atlanta – testifying on behalf of the COMPTEL.
• Justin Freeman, corporate counsel, Rackspace, San Antonio, TX – testifying on behalf of the Application Developers Alliance.
• Phyllis A Schneck, chief technology officer public sector, McAfee, Inc., Reston, VA

Congressman Chris Collins, chairman of the Health and Technology Subcommittee, under the House Small Business Committee, organized the hearing to get a better grasp on what steps the federal government could take to help small businesses get a better understanding of the threats and opportunities in the cyber-security ecosystem.

Dan Shapero did an excellent job representing the perspective of the CompTIA member community. Since he was only allowed to speak for five minutes, he focused his comments on the need for a national framework on data breach notification and the importance of expanding vendor-neutral notifications to help fill 250,000 open IT jobs. In addition, Dan shared highlights from the Clikcloud blog on steps companies can take to better protect their assets against cyber-threats and attacks.

The other panelists agreed that more could be done to spread information about cyber-security best practices, as well as that small businesses could do more to implement appropriate policies around password protection and encryption. In addition, the panel agreed that cyber-security is an ongoing process and that information sharing was a critical tool for the industry to help combat cyber-attacks and threats.

As Collins concluded the hearing, he stated that as a next step he would reach out to federal agencies, such as the Small Business Administration, to better understand what steps federal agencies are taking to assist small businesses with cyber-security best practices.