The U.S. Government Publishing Office’s (GPO) Office of Inspector General (IG) has flagged three continuing IT control issues at GPO involving access controls, separation of duties, and drafting of contingency plans in the event of service network service interruptions. […]
In a letter on Friday, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., questioned Steven Dillingham, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, over how nearly $5 billion in IT costs are being managed by the Bureau. His concerns come as IT costs grew by $1.56 billion between October 2015 and December 2017. […]
The Office of Personnel and Management (OPM) released a request for information on January 30 looking for vendors to help it implement a “one-stop shop” portal for comparing and enrolling in Federal Employees Health Benefits (FEHB) plans. The RFI is open for questions until February 15, and open for responses until March 11. […]
The White House announced Saturday that it has hired Roger Stone (not the one you’re thinking of) to serve as the deputy assistant to the President and director of White House IT. […]
Ricky Le has joined VMWare’s global government relations and public policy team, with a focus on Federal policy. […]
A trio of Defense Department IT heavyweights told senators at a Jan. 29 hearing that the agency is tightly focused on implementing the cybersecurity strategy it unveiled last year, and they expressed a high degree of confidence that their efforts in 2019 to implement that strategy will drive security improvements. […]
If recent events are any indication, we could be seeing big changes to agency cloud migration plans in 2019. The Federal government could be rethinking its role in owning and operating its own data centers, strongly questioning whether that is a job best left to government employees. […]
Google urged governments to avoid excessive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), instead suggesting “international standards and norms” in key areas in a white paper released last week. […]
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on Friday reintroduced the Modernizing the Trusted Workforce for the 21st Century Act, which would overhaul the Federal government’s security clearance process and tackle the government’s backlog of pending security clearance investigations. […]
President Trump hinted today at using emergency powers to begin construction of a wall at the U.S.-Mexico border, and suggested that an announcement to that effect may be part of his State of the Union speech next Tuesday. […]
The Department of Defense and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) today released a draft request for quotations (RFQ) for the $7.8 billion Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract. The deadline for responses is February 15. […]
Maria Roat, chief information officer at the Small Business Administration, provided a run-down of her office’s extensive to-do list during a keynote address on Thursday at the Veritas Public Sector Vision Day event, and emphasized the importance of laying the proper data-management policy groundwork before embarking on cloud deployments and forays into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]
The Bank Policy Institute, a nonpartisan public policy, research, and advocacy group, announced Thursday that it has hired Kenice Middleton to be its new senior vice president of cybersecurity risk management. […]
The chief data officer role has morphed quickly at Federal agencies, as agencies shift their focus from open data to supporting data-driven strategies, said two Federal CDOs during Veritas’ Public Sector Vision Day event on Thursday. […]
Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., is reintroducing the Kelsey Smith Act this week, a bill that would have wireless carriers ping the mobile devices of subscribers believed to be in danger and send their location information to law enforcement. […]
According to an internal evaluation report, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) program is behind schedule, undermanned, full of cybersecurity issues, and should be discontinued until the system demonstrates that it can assist network defenders in detecting and responding to cyberattacks. […]
Representative Susie Lee, D-Nev., will be taking over the congressional oversight of Veterans Affairs (VA) Department’s electronic health record modernizing by leading the Technology Modernization subcommittee of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs. […]
Valimail said in a report issued Friday that use of the Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance protocol (DMARC) is growing in both the public and private sectors, likely helped by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mandating its adoption across Federal agencies. DMARC is an email authentication protocol that verifies the authenticity of an email’s sender in order to prevent spoofing and phishing. […]
Max Everett, CIO at the Department of Energy (DoE), said Thursday he was “optimistic” about the agency’s progress on a host of IT issues, including network architecture, cloud adoption, data governance standards, and cybersecurity. […]
The prospects for an amicable legislative solution to President Trump’s demand for border wall funding appeared to take a turn for the worse today as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., predicted there will be no such funding coming from a House-Senate conference committee looking at the issue, while President Trump indicated that legislation to fully fund Federal government operations won’t “work” unless the border wall funding he wants is included. […]
Federal IT leaders discussed challenges within their agencies of overcoming divergent cultural views to data sharing during Veritas’ Public Sector Vision Day on Thursday. […]
From a cybersecurity perspective, the strengths of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are also weaknesses. The capacity to crunch massive amounts of data, identify patterns, and learn while working covers a lot of territory, but also leaves room for vulnerabilities, which Pentagon and Intelligence Community (IC) researchers want to close up. And the job doesn’t look easy. […]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Tuesday released the Democratic roster for the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which was created as part of a House Rules package adopted earlier this month when Democratic leadership took over in the House. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has not yet named the committee’s Republican members. […]
Jordan Rae Kelly is now a senior managing director in the cybersecurity practice for FTI Consulting. Kelly was previously the director for cyber incident response at the National Security Council (NSC). […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) has put a lot of emphasis on speeding up the acquisition and development of new technologies out of a need to keep pace with new advances and potential adversaries. But a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)–evaluating the Army Futures Command modernization effort–throws in a word of caution, saying there is such a thing as going too fast. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs failed to share Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) guidance across the department, leading to an estimated 860 unreported data centers and inadequate DCOI goals, according to a report released Wednesday by the agency’s inspector general. […]
The 17 members of Congress whose job it is to try to avert another partial Federal government shutdown held their first official meeting today, and two of the Democratic House members that are part of the House-Senate conference committee created to resolve differences on border security issues described the initial negotiating session as both cordial and constructive. […]
In the face of increased public scrutiny and increased calls for Congressional oversight into the social media giant’s cybersecurity habits, Facebook has made quite a few new cybersecurity hires. […]
The Federal Communications Commission announced that Geoffrey Starks was sworn in as a commissioner today. […]
Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, who has been an advocate for Federal IT policies on Capitol Hill, announced that he will be a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction and Veterans Affairs, and the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. […]