Infrastructure Bill May Drive Cybercriminals Underground, Critics Warn

President Joe Biden is expected to meet with the chief executives of Apple, Google, JPMorgan Chase and other leaders to pressure top tech companies, banks and utility providers to adopt stronger cybersecurity protections, reports the New York Times. Topics on the agenda include ransomware, the shortage of cybersecurity professionals and building software and devices with default security protections. The administration is also expected to press firms in critical sectors, such as water and energy, to improve their protections to prevent a repeat of the Colonial Pipeline hack.

However, despite talks of bolstered security, the Wall Street Journal reports that industry and national-security officials have raised concerns that measures included in the recently-passed infrastructure bill to help provide badly needed regulation of the burgeoning cryptocurrency industry could, instead, push illicit cryptocurrency transactions into markets where the U.S. government has no reach, adding to the threat to American companies, government agencies and individuals. Poorly calibrated regulations or overly aggressive oversight not only risks flight to other crypto markets but also threatens a critical U.S. national-security advantage: the dollar’s dominance as the world’s reserve currency, the critics say.