Hundreds of federal agencies should adopt an encryption tool to protect whistleblowers, veterans suffering from mental health crises and others from hackers who might target them when they reach out via agency websites, Sen. Ron Wyden said Monday.

The Oregon Democrat urged the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and Office of Management and Budget to take steps to adopt Encrypted Client Hello — a cybersecurity technology that protects the name of the website visited by a user — in a letter to the two agencies. His office identified at least 350 sites that don’t use its protections.

While almost all federal agency websites are encrypted, standard web encryption doesn’t secure some website names, Wyden said, using reportfraud.ftc.gov as an example.

“As data travels across the internet, hackers and foreign actors monitoring network connections can easily see these exposed website names,” he wrote. “This visibility could lead to malicious eavesdroppers identifying whistleblowers, profiling cleared federal personnel, tracking Americans seeking crisis support, and mapping interactions between agencies.”

Wyden wrote that Encrypted Client Hello (ECH) is especially effective with Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) that connect hundreds of thousands of websites to the internet. For websites delivered by a CDN, ECH makes it so anyone intercepting user web traffic can view the network delivering the content but not the specific site.

Agencies using CDN infrastructure without Encrypted Client Hello include an FBI tipline that supports ECH but doesn’t enable it and a Department of Veteran Affairs online suicide prevention hotline that isn’t protected by ECH because Amazon doesn’t support it, as well as agencies offering things like national security personnel services and whistleblower channels.

Because of the lack of ECH protection, foreign adversaries might be able to identify someone submitting crime tips to the FBI, Wyden warned.

Wyden made two recommendations to the leaders of CISA and the OMB.

“CISA should require that civilian federal agencies enable the protections of ECH across all public-facing websites and inter-agency web systems,” he said. “OMB, in coordination with the Office of the National Cyber Director and CISA, should establish support for ECH protections as a mandatory condition for commercial cloud and network vendors seeking federal contracts.”

CISA and OMB didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the letter, first reported by NextGov/FCW.

Wyden’s Monday missive is his most recent aimed at improving security technology at federal agencies, following on the heels of a letter in July first reported by CyberScoop that urged feds to get rid of older, insecure, public-facing VPNs.

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Federal government contractors that handle sensitive information could soon face a “sea change” in rules about how they protect that information and report when it has been part of a breach.

Pending federal regulations on the handling of “controlled unclassified information,” or CUI, a category of sensitive data that falls short of classified — including people’s personal information such as Social Security numbers, information that could expose vulnerabilities in critical infrastructure and more — could arrive as soon as the end of this year, but likely no later than the end of President Donald Trump’s term, attorneys who specialize in federal procurement rules said. The changes are part of a larger overhaul of federal contracting rules.

As currently written, the proposed CUI rules mandate that unauthorized access of such data, including as a result of a cyberattack, would have to be reported to the federal government within 72 hours of discovery. The rules are a companion for most federal agencies to existing  Defense Department rules that cover the same subject. The 72-hour notice also is deliberately aligned with forthcoming rules from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for critical infrastructure owners and operators to report major cyber incidents under the Cybersecurity Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act (CIRCIA).

The CUI rules require contractors to adhere to minimum electronic security standards for protecting that sensitive information. Experts said the rules could expose contractors who fail to comply with cybersecurity guidelines to penalties under the False Claims Act, a lever that the federal government has been using increasingly since 2022 to punish contractors over lackluster cyber safeguards.

It’s “going to be a sea change for a lot of companies,” said Trayce Howard, a government contracts partner at Wiley Rein. 

“If it’s finalized in the form that it’s in now, it will be a fairly significant change for federal contractors,” said Ryan Burnette, a partner at Covington focused on government contracts and technology.

Susan Cassidy, another partner at Covington who advises government contractors, said the proposed regulation is part of a journey that began as far back as an executive order in 2010, when officials realized they couldn’t have sufficient, consistent requirements for protecting CUI given that so many agencies used different terminology for it: “sensitive but unclassified,” “for official use only,” and more.

The proposed rule is intended to “make it easier for contractors to comply with one set of standards, rather than many different types of standards” for the protection of CUI and the reporting on CUI incidents such as breaches, she said.

One industry source who spoke on condition of anonymity was candid about the difficulties CUI poses.

“CUI can be painful for many industry stakeholders because it’s not always clear what constitutes CUI,” the source said. “Many contractors will say they don’t necessarily know exactly what CUI is, despite their best efforts. Information from agencies isn’t always clearly marked as CUI.”

The reporting requirements

An earlier draft of the rule gave industry groups more heartburn: It had an 8-hour standard for reporting CUI incidents, rather than 72, and it required reporting of suspected incidents as well.

Still, a number of industry groups objected to the 72-hour standard, despite it being part of a much-sought after attempt to align federal breach reporting notification standards under CIRCIA.

The Aerospace Industries Association, for instance, said in filed comments that it “reiterates concerns with these compressed timelines which will be difficult and costly for industry to comply with,” in reference to the 72-hour standard. “AIA recommends extending these timelines to 30 calendar days to accommodate improved reporting while reducing compliance costs.”

The industry source said that “72 hours is largely a policy decision, based on extensive public-private deliberation,” rather than one based on any study of what’s best.

Another point of discussion about the reporting rule as written is where contractors report incidents.

“While the 72-hour reporting window is a significant improvement over the 8-hour window in the January 2025 proposal, the June 2026 rulemaking still appears to require reporting to agency -specific points of contact … rather than to a single centralized hub,” the Chamber of Commerce wrote in its comments.

Cassidy said “it will be interesting to see how centralized reporting into CISA, which is the other place where civilian agencies go, is handled, and whether there’s coordination with DOD or whether or not we still see two separate streams going through.”

The standards

The other major aspect of the proposed rule is that contractors handling CUI would have to abide by certain cybersecurity standards set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology known as SP 800-171, which Howard and her Wiley coauthors said would be imposed “on a broader group of contractors than ever before.” Some contractors might also have to meet other cybersecurity requirements, too.

“Another thing that will affect contractors is they’re going to have to flow down these requirements to their subcontractors,” she said. “So they’re going to have to identify what CUI am I giving to my subcontractors, and do some sort of oversight to make sure that their subcontractors are appropriately handling CUI.”

Howard and other experts predict that the rules could expand who might be subjected to False Claims Act punishments.

“I do think that this creates some significant False Claims at risk for contractors,” she said. This is going to encompass a whole new universe of contractors that may not be quite ready for that… contractors that have been working for civilian agencies exclusively have not been subject to this before.”

Final steps

The next steps aren’t 100 percent clear. Howard said a final rule could arrive by the end of the year. Cassidy said either an interim rule could take effect soon, or a final rule could be issued. Burnette said a final rule might be farther away, though the Trump administration has made it clear it wants everything finalized before the end of its term.

That means contractors need to get ready, he said.

“I think contractors should really be looking at this, preparing for it in certain ways, at least by recognizing at a high level, where this is headed and the types of activities and steps they need to be doing internally,” Burnette said. “Some of the minutia and the details, those are still subject to ironing out. But generally speaking, if you look at this rule compared to the rule that we saw early last year, they are much more similar than they are different. So we are starting to see  some crystallization here of the requirements, and we’re starting to get an idea what might change and what is most likely baked at this point.”

The Office of Management and Budget did not respond to requests for comment.

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Sen. Ron Wyden implored a trio of federal leaders Monday to lead a comprehensive campaign to purge older, insecure virtual private networks that are directly accessible via the public internet from federal agencies.

“For too long, federal agencies and government contractors have suffered devastating cyberattacks due to their reliance on legacy, insecure, internet-facing VPN servers to grant employees remote access,” Wyden, D-Ore., wrote in his missive to top officials at the Office of Management and Budget, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and National Institute of Standards and Technology. They should coordinate “require the adoption of modern, secure remote-access technology across the federal government,” he said.

Such VPNs serve as a digital “front door” accessible via the public internet that allows mobile devices and remote employees to log in, Wyden said in a letter first reported by CyberScoop.

Wyden referenced several attacks that have affected federal agencies, including the ArcaneDoor attacks on Cisco firewalls, the FortiBleed credential exposures across Fortinet gateways and vulnerabilities that hackers exploited across Ivanti and Check Point VPN appliances.

“Modern remote-access solutions eliminate this vulnerability entirely. Instead of leaving an open door accessible from the public internet, modern solutions provide remote access without broadcasting their presence,” he said. “This effectively makes these servers invisible, ensuring that hackers cannot attack an entry point they cannot see.”

Agencies should move away from what a Congressional Research Service report to Wyden called a “castle-and-moat” approach of assuming anyone inside the network is authorized to access an organization’s resources that VPNs rely upon by extending virtual bridges to a more remote workforce, he said. They should instead focus on zero-trust architecture that uses a never-trust, always-verify approach, he said.

Furthermore, CISA, the OMB and NIST need to fundamentally change how the federal government approaches agency vulnerabilities, Wyden wrote. 

“The federal government has become trapped in an endless game of ‘whack-a-mole’ in responding to widespread compromises of legacy remote access technologies,” he said. “To keep federal networks online, CISA has been forced to repeatedly issue extraordinary Emergency Directives and hyper-accelerated patch mandates. These reactive emergency mandates are unsustainable for federal cybersecurity teams, and fail to address the fundamental issue that these flaws are inherent in the use of legacy remote-access appliances.”

CISA needs to issue a binding operational directive that gives agencies two years to fully expunge legacy, public-facing remote access systems, he said. NIST needs to issue implementation standards for transitioning to zero-trust architectures.

OMB needs to issue a memo directing agencies to prioritize zero-trust architecture spending. And OMB needs to team with CISA and the Defense Department to update procurement rules to block agencies and defense contractors from buying network edge, VPN or other remote access solutions unless a vendor supplies an attestation that it complies with NIST zero-trust standards, Wyden wrote.

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Trump administration budget chief Russell Vought told lawmakers Tuesday that he’s willing to work with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin on re-staffing up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, following deep personnel cuts and further proposed reductions in the fiscal 2027 budget blueprint.

Mullin said last week at a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security hearing that he would like to hire 600 more people at CISA, similar to remarks he made earlier this month at another House hearing. President Donald Trump has cut or lost more than 1,000 from an agency that stood around 3,400-strong at the end of the Biden administration — cuts criticized by lawmakers in both parties.

At a House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government   hearing Tuesday, Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev., asked Vought about Mullin’s CISA remarks.

“You don’t just flip a light switch on, and you got 600 folks over in CISA now. What’s the plan for getting CISA fully operational?” Amodei, who chairs the panel’s Subcommittee on Homeland Security, asked. “How do we make sure we have a robust, effective, cost-effective CISA force? Because I don’t think anybody thinks we have it now.”

Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said he hasn’t received a formal request from Mullin to increase CISA’s number of full-time employees, but knows that hiring isn’t instantaneous.

“He was not here when we developed this budget, so if he feels the need to have additional resources, we will work through that internally, and at the appropriate time, come up and brief you,” he answered Amodei. “I do think he’s in the process still of getting his arms wrapped around the department,” he said. Mullen became DHS secretary in late March.

“This is probably one of those things, particularly in the cyber world, you now have a year and a half of a new administration,” Vought continued, and referred to conservative complaints about how CISA handled election security and disinformation under Biden. “We saw this agency had major concerns with it in our four years outside of government and with new management, I think it’s now an agency, or could be an agency, that plays a very valuable part for DHS’s portfolio.”

Bringing hundreds of new CISA personnel on board could prove challenging for reasons beyond the usual bureaucratic hurdles and security clearance processes that slow any federal hires in the national security space. Past CISA employees and agency observers have said the way the Trump administration has purged personnel and treated those who have stayed could prove a further disincentive to future hires.

Acting CISA director Nick Andersen recently said that the agency has begun the process of hiring new CISA staffers, and expected to have nearly 200 job offers out by the end of this month.

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