The Department of Justice said today it indicted eight people from Russia and Kazakhstan allegedly involved in two cybercriminal rings engaged in digital advertising fraud. […]

More than 200 Google engineering, research, and project management employees have signed a petition calling on the company to cancel its Dragonfly project, which the employees said aims to create a “censored search engine for the Chinese market that enables state surveillance.” […]

The National Defense Strategy Commission released recommendations this week for the Pentagon’s National Defense Strategy, including an urgent need to improve cyber defenses. […]

The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said it fined ride-sharing provider Uber 385,000 pounds (U.S. $490,000) for failing to take adequate steps to protect the personal data of its customers during a cyberattack suffered by the company in 2016. […]

General Services Administration officials said today they expect their plan to consolidate 24 multiple award schedules into a single schedule for products and services to take about two years to complete, and that the effort is expected to yield workforce cost savings and efficiencies for both GSA and private sector partners that sell to the Federal government. […]

In an Inspector General (IG) report released Nov. 20, the Department of the Interior got taken to task for allowing an employee to visit 9,000 pornographic websites in under seven months. This is the IG second report chastising the department for an employee viewing porn on agency time and technology. […]

The General Services Administration (GSA) released a request for information detailing part of the Federal Acquisition Service’s (FAS’) new CIO Modernization and Enterprise Transformation contract–named COMET for short–and highlighted the guiding principles of cloud-native solutions, SecDevOps, and data management. […]

The General Services Administration (GSA) announced on Tuesday that the agency is condensing its 24 multiple award schedules, including IT Schedule 70, into a single schedule for products and services, in a move that it says will simplify acquisitions for Federal agencies. […]

A draft of the new Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) policy released Monday reorients the focus of DCOI toward optimization–rather than data center consolidations and closures–and revises metrics for the program. […]

In advance of a scheduled meeting between President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit this week, a new update from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) released on November 20 details China’s continued policies of stealing information from U.S. companies through cyberattacks. […]

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), meeting last week to consider data protection issues broadly, discussed the importance of protecting digital information and privacy in an era of increasing global terrorism and cybercrime. […]

The Defense Information Services Agency (DISA) is set to release new contracts for classified and unclassified mobility services to accommodate the growth in the area, said Jacob Marcellus, mobility program portfolio manager, during DISA’s 2018 Forecast to Industry event. “We actually have two impending acquisitions, MES-U [Mobility Enterprise Services Unclassified], which will cover all unclassified […]

The House has scheduled consideration later this week of several pieces of legislation impacting Federal IT issues including Federal CIO authorities and agency website functionality and performance. […]

The U.S. Postal Services (USPS) has fixed a security flaw within its Informed Delivery service that was allowing criminals to perpetrate a multitude of identity theft and credit card fraud schemes. […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is looking to use cloud services to speed up the agency’s scientific discoveries and offer researchers more tools through a new program named Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science, or E-CAS. […]

An undated draft proposal developed by the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC) for a national “moonshot” to dramatically improve cybersecurity envisions at ten-year horizon to get to the “fundamental goal of making the Internet safe and secure.” […]

A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that while the CIO of the U.S. Secret Service had implemented most IT oversight responsibilities, the agency still needs to improve its workforce planning and management practices. […]

The New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute earlier this week announced the promotion of Sarah Morris to deputy director. […]

The White House on Nov. 21 announced President Trump’s intention to appoint former Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. […]

Technology sales leaders received an in-depth look at Federal agency budget forecasts during immixGroup’s Government IT Sales Summit, held Thursday, Nov. 15 in Reston, Va., shining a light on how government IT spending will take shape in the coming year. […]

The IC’s top research arm, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), wants to be able to get the gist anywhere and anytime. They are inviting researchers from around the world in industry and academia to use machine learning to develop algorithms for cross-lingual information retrieval capable of extracting answers from little-known foreign languages to questions posed in English. IARPA’s Open Cross-language Information Retrieval (CLIR) Challenge is inviting participants to compete for prizes while working on a kind of fast-working translator that can interpret other languages while using a minimal amount of training data, focusing particularly on what it calls “computationally underserved languages.” […]

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) failed to record compromised taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) for 89 breaches reported to the agency by outside organizations, putting over 11,000 taxpayers at risk and leading to tax return fraud for 79 citizens, according to an audit conducted by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA). […]

The Government Accountability Office recommended in a Nov. 20 report that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) improve its website and take more steps to share “innovations in performance management” with other Federal agencies. […]

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced Tuesday her intention to restore the Elections Subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration, which was created during the 110th Congress but abolished in 2013. Pelosi, who will likely be elected House majority leader when Democrats take control of the House in January, also announced that Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, will serve as chairwoman of the subcommittee. […]

With November being National Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency Month, cyberattacks on electricity providers like the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) are being brought into focus, and a new report from TVA’s Inspector General raises some concerns about the organization’s ability to deal with potential ransomware attacks. […]

After years of speculation and some significant recent advancements as the next great thing, quantum computing is getting ready to throw down against classical supercomputers. […]

The Pentagon wants to make ordering up a space launch as easy as hailing an Uber. […]

Federal agencies are using the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework to manage their agencies’ cybersecurity risk, a year after the White House issued an executive order directing the heads of executive agencies and departments to use the NIST framework, according to an agency official. […]

The State Department is standing up a cloud program office and taking the opportunity to modernize both systems across the department, according to Brian Merrick, deputy director of cloud program management at the State Department. […]

A report from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) released Monday argues that devices infected by botnets need to be eliminated. The report proposed increasing regulations and holding more organizations accountable for malicious botnet activity to achieve its goal. […]