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A group of US Senators say that the Board is a key piece of the government’s cybersecurity strategy
A group of U.S. Senate Democrats has penned an open letter to Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, imploring her to reinstate the Cyber Safety Review Board (CSRB) as a matter of urgency.
Created by the Biden administration in 2022, the CSRB was designed to review and assess major cybersecurity incidents and provide recommendations to the Department of Homeland Security. The advisory body comprised 20 permanent members from both the public and private sector, including the likes of National Cyber Director Chris Inglis and Google security engineering VP Heather Adkins.
Since then, the Board has investigated numerous high-profile cyberattacks, including the Microsoft Exchange Online breach in 2023, which saw hackers gain access to the mailboxes of 22 organisations and more than 500 individuals, including key US officials like the Commerce Secretary and the US ambassador to China.
More recently, the CSRB was involved in examining the Salt Typhoon cyberattacks of late last year, a series of cybersecurity breaches liked to the Chinese government that have been described as the ‘worst in the nation’s history’.
At the start of this year, however, the CSRB’s work was to come to an abrupt halt. On his first day in office, President Donald Trump dissolved the CSRB and all other advisory boards, calling them a misallocation of government resources.
Acting Secretary Benjamine C. Huffman explained the decision at the time as being “in alignment with the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) commitment to eliminating the misuse of resources and ensuring that DHS activities prioritize our national security.”
The move was met with immediate criticism, with both analysts and government figures saying the move would delay investigations into Salt Typhoon and threaten national security.
“It is a national security imperative that the investigation be completed expeditiously,” said Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House Homeland Security panel, at a committee hearing the following week. “I’m troubled that the president’s attempt to stack the CSRB with loyalists may cause its important work on the Salt Typhoon campaign to be delayed. The American people deserve better.”
Today, in their open letter, the four US Senators are expressing similar concerns.
“As we have noted, the CSRB had been actively investigating potentially the most expansive and impactful cyber security breach in U.S. history: the unprecedented compromises of U.S. and global telecommunications infrastructure by threat actors associated with the People’s Republic of China, widely referred to as ‘Salt Typhoon’. However, the CSRB’s investigation into the Salt Typhoon compromises of U.S. telecommunication firms, launched in 2024, was effectively terminated on January 20, 2025 and is depriving the public of a fuller accounting of the origin, scope, scale, and severity of these compromises,” said the senators in the letter. “It is essential that the U.S. develop a complete and thorough understanding of the factors that contributed to the success of these intrusions – including clear root-cause analyses of each successful penetration – and present key recommendations for the telecommunications sector to better protect itself against similarly complex and large-scale compromises by future threat actors.”
Shortly following the CSRB’s disbandment, DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar noted that the bureau would be revived “at the right time”, but no further communication on the matter has yet been provided.
“You have had more than four months to reestablish this Board to conduct this critical work – DHS leadership and CISA must work together to immediately reinstate the Board as a crucial part of America’s cyber defense infrastructure,” concluded the Senators’ letter.
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