Hacker-Powered Security, Government Support Needed to Protect Financial Services Consumers from Application Vulnerabilities

Christopher Parsons' testimony highlights systemic cybersecurity risks facing the financial sector, including widespread software vulnerabilities (shared libraries, APIs, RNGs), cloud-hosting weaknesses, and the dangers of government-mandated encryption backdoors and secret hoarding of vulnerabilities. He advocates for policies that protect strong end-to-end encryption, transparent government vulnerability-handling processes, adoption of vulnerability disclosure policies by organizations, and mandatory, robust two-factor authentication for consumer-facing financial services.