- The FCC is repealing cybersecurity regulations for telecommunications companies
- These protections were introduced after the network intrusion by the Chinese threat actor Salt Typhoon.
- The Trump administration is removing regulations across the industry
The Republican-led Federal Communications Commission (FCC) voted to eliminate measures implemented in the wake of the salt typhoon attack.
The mandatory protections required telecommunications companies to adopt basic security controls and network protections, and encouraged collaboration among large network providers to protect consumers and national security.
In the Salt Typhoone attacks, threat actors lurked inside US telecommunications networks for more than a year, extracting data in one of the largest cyber espionage campaigns on record.
“Neither lawful nor effective”
The FCC voted to overturn the ruling, saying it was “ineffective because it was neither responsive to the nature of the relevant cybersecurity threats nor consistent with the agile and collaborative approach to cybersecurity that has proven successful,” the Commission documents state.
FCC members argue that telecommunications companies are voluntarily beefing up their cybersecurity and hardening their networks against intrusions, making the regulations an onerous legal burden on companies that are already doing the work.
Secretary Marlene Dortch said the protection ruling “applies the same inflexible, general cybersecurity requirements to all telecommunications operators without regard to their risk, size or organizational posture.”
“This vague and amorphous standard risks imposing costly new burdens on many vendors that are either not relevant to the potential threats they face, or are redundant because those vendors may already employ sufficient cybersecurity practices to reasonably reduce the risk of successful attacks by the most sophisticated threat actors,” he wrote.
The move follows a predictable pattern in a Trump administration that has repeatedly illustrated its lack of prioritization of online protection, having already decimated public cybersecurity services through layoffs and reassignments within CISA.
The administration has also demonstrated its goals in deregulation, especially within the technology industry, going so far as to overturn state laws to dismantle existing protections for AI consumers in order to give more freedoms to AI companies.
Through The record
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