On Friday, December 4, 2020, H.R. 1668, the Internet of Things (IoT) Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2020, was signed into law. The bipartisan bill was sponsored by Senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Cory Gardner (R-CO) in the Senate and Representatives Robin Kelly (D-IL), and Will Hurd (R-TX) in the House. The new law will require IoT devices “owned or controlled” by the federal government to meet minimum security standards that address network vulnerabilities, and it may have significant implications for government contractors. It was introduced in response to a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2016, in which the Mirai malware variant was used to compromise tens of thousands of IoT devices, causing a severe disruption in commercial web services.
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