The U.S. House of Representatives has passed a slate of four cybersecurity Bills as part of “Cyber Week”.  The main effects of these Bills are :

• to provide positive authority to private-sector entities to defend their own networks and to those of their customers, and to share cyber threat information with others in the private sector, as well as with the federal government on a purely voluntary basis;
• to establish a mechanism for stronger oversight of information technology systems, by focusing on “automated and continuous monitoring” of cybersecurity threats;
• to strengthen the efforts of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in the areas of cybersecurity technical standards and cybersecurity awareness, education, and talent development; and
• to reauthorize the NITRD program, which focuses on R&D to detect, prevent, resist, respond to, and recover from actions that compromise or threaten to compromise the availability, integrity, or confidentiality of computer-and network-based systems.

The Bills have been delivered to the Senate, which is expected to consider the cybersecurity legislation sometime in June 2012.