The Daily Sentinel (Grand Junction): Electronic information and private databases have been stolen or leaked or simply allowed to be accessed by the wrong people nationwide, but a bill that won preliminary approval in the Colorado Senate would try to guard against that.

The measure, SB86, calls on the Colorado Office of Information Technology to institute a statewide cybersecurity system designed to protect all the sensitive data that the state’s many departments have, from Social Security numbers to private tax information.

“Our government systems are attacked approximately eight million times per day,” said Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, who introduced the bill with Sen. Angela Williams, D-Denver.

“The CEO of Facebook is facing congressional inquiries about selling private data,” Lambert added. “We’ve had problems with some of our largest credit organizations that collect background information on each individual, practically the entire country, to do credit checks. We’ve had other problems within our own state employee systems, within our voter record databases. We should all be very, very concerned.”

Under the bill, the OIT office would get an additional $9.8 million to work with computer experts and the state’s universities to develop whatever coding cryptology is needed to protect state computer networks.

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