The bill is similar to a measure approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee and headed for that chamber’s floor. Should the House and Senate come together on final legislation, it would be the federal government’s most aggressive response yet to a spate of computer attacks that helped sink a major motion picture release by Sony Pictures Entertainment, exposed the credit card numbers of tens of thousands of customers of Target stores and compromised the personal records of millions of people who did business with the health insurer Anthem.
The House bill would provide legal liability protections for companies that share cyber-threat information with each other or with the government. If a company shares information with the government, it would receive liability protection only if its data undergoes two rounds of washing out personal information — once by the company before it gives the data to the government and another round by the government agency that receives the data, which many experts believe is critical in getting companies to comply.
Early in 2015, Anthem reported a major breach that exposed the records of nearly 80 million people. Just last week, Target agreed to reimburse MasterCard USD 19 million for losses associated with the theft of 40 million credit and debit card numbers from its computer network in December 2013.
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