Washington, D.C. - Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ) released the following statement today after the Government Accountability Office (GAO) unveiled a report recommending that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) take aggressive action to enhance the cybersecurity of its Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) and other information systems:
“I requested this report because it was clear, after the net neutrality repeal comment period debacle, that the FCC’s cybersecurity practices had failed. After more than two years of investigating, GAO agrees and found a disturbing lack of security that places the Commission’s information systems at risk. GAO recommended 136 actions the FCC should take to ensure its systems are protected, but, according to the GAO, the Commission has yet to fully implement all of them. Until the FCC implements all of the remaining recommendations, its systems will remain vulnerable to failure and misuse. Chairman Pai must act swiftly to fix these vulnerabilities and restore trust back into the ECFS and the FCC’s cybersecurity practices overall."
Pallone and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) requested the report over two years ago after the FCC erroneously claimed the ECFS suffered a distributed denial-of-service attack during the comment period for its disastrous net neutrality repeal order. At an FCC oversight hearing in December, Pallone foreshadowed the troubling results of GAO’s report and urged Chairman Pai to address these issues before the release of today’s report.
