Security News > 2021 > August > Senate Report: Federal Agencies Still Have Poor Cybersecurity Practices
A bipartisan report released this week by the United States Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee shows that key government agencies have made little progress in terms of cybersecurity over the past two years.
A report published in 2019 found that eight federal agencies failed to meet even the basic cybersecurity standards and protocols.
Two years later, cybersecurity at those agencies was again analyzed and the findings are - as described in the new report - "Stark."
The findings are alarming considering that threat actors believed to be working for the Chinese and Russian governments successfully infiltrated many federal agencies since the previous report.
"While several of the agencies made minimal improvements in one or more areas, inspectors general found essentially the same failures as the prior 10 years," the 47-page report reads.
In addition to pointing out problems, ?the report makes some recommendations, including the OMB developing and requiring agencies to adopt a risk-based budgeting model for IT investments, a coordinated approach for government-wide cybersecurity to ensure accountability, CISA expanding shared services offerings to federal agencies, and Congress making some changes to the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014.