Warner: Hack-reporting law ‘one of the few areas left where there’s broad bipartisan support’

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) said in an interview that aired Sunday that enacting laws for reporting cyber breaches is “one of the few areas left where there’s broad bipartisan support.”

Warner made the remarks while appearing on Gray Television’s “Full Court Press with Greta Van Susteren.” Van Susteren asked the Virginia senator what was preventing the passage of legislation to create a requirement for data breach reporting for the private sector.

“Well Greta, this is an area where, one of the few areas left where there’s broad bipartisan support. I can tell you on our Intel committee, we’ve got the whole committee,” Warner said.

“Democrats, Republicans working on this. The business community has actually changed their position. As long as people can confidentially, and they get some limited immunity, and we already have those provisions on voluntary … reporting, I think we can get this done,” he added.

Warner’s remarks comes about a week after a ransomware attack shut down Colonial Pipeline, which supplies much of the gas to the Southeast, for several days. The hack was carried out by ransomware hacking group DarkSide, a group believed to have ties in Eastern Europe. Last week the group announced it was disbanding due to “pressure” from the U.S.

Van Susteren asked Warner if he saw involvement from the Russian government in the pipeline breach.

“Whether this was connected to the Russian government or not, I can tell you the Russian spy services, the Chinese spy services, were watching how this plays out, watching what kind of chaos that this created in our country,” Warner said. “Because the truth is, these countries who are adversaries, they don’t want to get in a shooting match with America. They want to find ways to disable our infrastructure or disable part of our defense system.”

According to Warner, the U.S. economy is significantly more dependent on technology than that of Russia’s or China’s.

“You shut down Moscow for 24 hours, you got a problem. We shut down New York for 24 hours, you got a crisis,” Warner said.