This past October was the country’s first National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and that makes it an appropriate time to touch on a very troubling first-party exposure. Every day brings news of massive cyber attacks on retailers, financial institutions, and hospitals and healthcare companies, with the aim of stealing digital assets such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII). What has received far, far less attention, however, is the prospect of a cyber attack designed to escape the virtual world in order to do physical damage to tangible property in the real one. The ultimate risk is enormous. Computerized industrial control systems run the world’s financial institutions, its manufacturing and chemical facilities, its transportation systems, and its energy infrastructure, including the electrical…
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Our Dysfunctional Congress Skedaddles, Leaving TRIA to Die
Last Friday we reported that the House of Representatives had finally passed a bill reauthorizing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA) and sent it to the Senate. The post included a picture of a cartoon bomb with a lit fuse because the statute was due to expire in only two weeks. On Tuesday, in an epic act of irresponsibility, the Senate allowed that to happen, adjourning for the year without taking up the measure and leaving TRIA to sunset on December 31st. Congress has a bad habit of larding important legislation like TRIA with wholly-unrelated provisions, and it was one of those that doomed reauthorization. When the Senate wrote its own reauthorization bill earlier this year, it proposed including a…
If It’s December, It Must Finally Be Time for Congress to Do Something About TRIA
It looks like Congress is finally turning its attention to reauthorizing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA). The statute will sunset on December 31st unless action is taken before then. Addressing our nation’s urgent problems at the last possible minute has become a Congressional hallmark in recent decades, and TRIA is no exception. We ran a post explaining how the statute works in early May, and we optimistically titled it “Congress Moves Towards Reauthorization of TRIA.” We should have known better. TRIA was enacted in 2002 with a sunset date of December 31, 2005. It has since been reauthorized twice – for two years by the Terrorism Risk Insurance Extension Act (TRIEA) in 2005 and then again for seven years…
Congress Moves Towards Reauthorization of TRIA
Congress returned last week from an extended spring recess with few legislative days left on the calendar before the mid-term elections and a long list of must-do legislation. One piece of legislation that seems certain to get attention will be a bill reauthorizing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act (TRIA). In testimony presented over the last year before committees in the House of Representatives and the Senate, insurance industry representatives have made it clear that the federal backstop provided under TRIA is still relevant and essential to ensuring that terrorism risk insurance is both widely available and affordable. This has led to bipartisan and bicameral support for a reauthorization of TRIA that now seems certain to happen. Only two questions remain:…
