<b><i>Breaking News:</b></i> Much Ado About 'Minimum Standards' for DFS Cybersecurity Regulation

The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) made headlines on September 13 by announcing a 'first-in-the-nation,' comprehensive cybersecurity regulation, which will mandate 16 'minimum standards' for the 4,000+ institutions operating under DFS jurisdiction. From a practical perspective, the proposed regulation adopts or aligns with guidance from the 2014 National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Framework, portions of the Fair Trade Commission's 2015 Start with Security program, as well as the basic requirements that banks have established and enforced for their third party vendors for several years. In short, there is nothing revolutionary or innovative in the proposed regulation. Indeed, the DFS acknowledges that 'many firms have proactively increased their cybersecurity programs with great success,' and its own 2013 survey found that 90% of institutions (and 98% of large institutions) had implemented a comprehensive information security framework. Notwithstanding sensational headlines, a review of the volume of significant breaches at financial institutions over the last decade supports the conclusion that financial institutions are taking cybersecurity extremely seriously; large data breaches occur less and less frequently, and the root cause seldom is poor security. All of this begs the questions ' why the need for New York's proposed regulation, and what will be the practical impact for financial and other institutions across the country?