The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that the Federal Communications Commission fully implemented 85 out of 136 recommendations for resolving security deficiencies in the FCC’s platform for processing public comments on proposed rule amendments.
GAO said in a report released Friday that the FCC fully implemented 63 percent of the recommendations for the Electronic Comment Filing System as of November. However, the latter only partially implemented 10 recommendations and is yet to implement the remaining 41.
The watchdog noted that it issued a report to the FCC in September detailing its recommendations for ECFS’s improvement after 22 million public comments disrupted the interface in 2017. Among the vulnerabilities that GAO cited are deficiencies in core security functions as well as detection, response and recovery procedures.
According to GAO, the FCC has since “bolstered the capacity and performance” of ECFS and implemented technical controls and information security programs. FCC is slated to implement GAO’s remaining recommendations by April 2021, the report states.
