Brooklyn, N.Y. – Today, Congresswoman Yvette D. Clarke commended her colleagues on the Homeland Security Committee who unanimously passed a bill to improve cybersecurity by supporting collaboration between federal agencies and private companies to protect our information and require additional monitoring of potentially vulnerable systems.

Congresswoman Clarke was an original co-sponsor of the bill, the National Cybersecurity and Critical Infrastructure Protection Act of 2013, with Chairman Michael McCaul and Ranking Member Bennie Thompson of the Homeland Security Committee and Subcommittee on Cybersecurity Chairman Patrick Meehan.

Only weeks after the bill was introduced, Target and Nieman Marcus disclosed that millions of bank account numbers and PIN numbers, as well as names and addresses, had been stolen by hackers. There were more than one-hundred million credit and debit cards involved in the breach of security.

“For most people, cybersecurity has become the ‘Wild West’ – you pay for products and services at a store with a credit or debit card or send forms to a government agency, and hope that your information will remain private. You have to hope for the best. The people who shopped at Target or Nieman Marcus this holiday season had to hope for the best, and today many of them are still worried about finding unauthorized charges on their bank accounts. We want to provide security that people know will work,” said Congresswoman Clarke. “We have the ability to develop better forms of protection for our bank account numbers and other personal information.”

U.S. Representative Yvette D. Clarke is a member of the House Committee on Small Business, Ethics, and Homeland Security, where she is the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection, and Security Technologies. She represents many neighborhoods in central and southern Brooklyn, NY which include Brownsville, Crown Heights, East Flatbush, Flatbush, Gerritsen Beach, Madison, Midwood, parts of Park Slope and Flatlands, Prospect Heights, Prospect-Lefferts Gardens, Sheepshead Bay, and Windsor Terrace.