Dana Deasy, CIO at the Department of Defense, detailed this week how the Pentagon is adapting to the realities of using mobile devices and turning them into an advantage for the agency. […]

The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC)–a group formed last year to promote international stability by developing policy proposals and norms to guide responsible state and non-state behavior in cyberspace–on Thursday issued a set of six global norms that the group hopes will promote “the peaceful use of cyberspace.” […]

Following President Trump’s proclamation of November as National Critical Infrastructure Security and Resilience Month, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen released a statement on Wednesday saying she and DHS are “committed to strengthening our efforts to protect and secure the infrastructure on which Americans rely, in close partnership with other Federal agencies, state, local, territorial and tribal governments, and the private sector.” […]

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE), a partnership of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the state of Maryland, is seeking public comment by Dec. 6 on a draft report (NISTIR 8219) detailing cybersecurity guidance aimed at the manufacturing sector that employs industrial control systems to monitor and control physical processes. […]

A report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace released Wednesday found that “harnessing the full potential of cyber insurance will be imperative for preventing systemic cyber incidents of concern for governments and the private sector alike.” […]

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) announced today that it issued $1,272,320 of funding awards to develop new solutions to “improve the capability of organizations to understand and improve their cybersecurity control investment decisions.” The funding will be split between University of California, San Diego and University of Illinois, Chicago. […]

The demand for cybersecurity professionals is growing, according to data published Wednesday on CyberSeek, a free online resource from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Burning Glass, and CompTIA. […]

The United States is finally making no bones about its willingness to go after adversaries in cyberspace. […]

The race between Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee’s IT subcommittee, and challenger Gina Ortiz Jones, is too close to call, according to media outlets. […]

As Federal government agencies continue their methodical march to IT modernization spurred on by congressional and administration mandates, two senior Department of Homeland Security (DHS) IT officials emphasized today the importance of the needs of core agency missions in leading those efforts. […]

New guidance for the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) will likely include revised performance goals for agencies, revised metrics for energy metering and virtualization, and new metrics for under-utilized servers, availability, and old hardware, said Jake Wooley, IT sustainability program manager at the Department of Energy (DoE), during MeriTalk’s 2018 Data Center Brainstorm. […]

Commerce Sec. Wilbur Ross announced Tuesday that Laura Peter has joined the department as the deputy under secretary of Commerce for intellectual property and deputy director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). […]

On Nov. 5, the United States implemented sanctions against Iran, which the Treasury Department described as the “largest ever single-day action targeting the Iranian regime.” While the sanctions were ostensibly targeting Iran’s growing nuclear program, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a think tank which vacillates between nonpartisan, hawkish, and neoconservative in terms of its political leanings, argued in a report released Tuesday that the United States should be concerned about the cybersecurity implications of the new sanctions. […]

In a scene from the movie “The Matrix,” Carrie Anne Moss’ character calls to get a flight program for a certain kind of helicopter, and after a few blinks of the eyes, the program is installed in her brain and she’s ready to roll. The Pentagon’s lead research arm isn’t quite at that point yet, […]

As Congressional members celebrate and lament the results of yesterday’s midterm elections, Federal IT leaders face a changed landscape on Capitol Hill, with a new party in charge of the House and close elections for several members key to initiatives like FITARA, Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM), and IT modernization. Here are some of the key races and their results: […]

The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has declined to hear a case regarding the legality of Obama-era Net Neutrality rules–putting an end to a lengthy legal battle by declining to hear USTelecom’s appeal. The telecommunication industry group originally sued the Federal Communications Committee (FCC) under the belief that the FCC lacked the authority to impose public-utility, common-carrier obligations on broadband internet access service. Under the Obama-era rules, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) were barred from blocking or throttling web content or creating the so-called internet “fast lanes.” […]

The Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a joint statement Monday night stating that none of the organizations had seen any compromises that would threaten midterm election voting. […]

Cybersecurity firm Morphisec said that 63 percent of 1,000 Americans that it surveyed in late October regarded the threat of “adversaries propagating misinformation on social networks” as a “more significant threat” to the U.S. midterm elections than possible cyber attacks against voting infrastructure. […]

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC) awarded a $100 million IT services contract to Reston, Va.-based TeraThink on Oct. 29. […]

A new report on FISMA compliance from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB) found that the bureau has consistently implemented its information security programs but also called on CFPB to strengthen its enterprise risk management program, among other recommendations. […]

While the Department of Veterans Affairs is approaching IT modernization with a strong desire to improve systems, especially when it comes to electronic health records (EHR), the agency is taking care not to shut down existing systems too early, said deputy CIO and chief information security officer Dominic Cussatt during an episode of Government Matters that aired on Sunday. […]

The White House is looking to finalize its new Cloud Smart policy following the release of a draft at the end of September. Agencies and other stakeholders have been given just over a month to express how to make improvements to the new policy. […]

Tech giant Intel today unveiled its proposal for a national data privacy law that aims to strengthen personal data privacy rules as a necessary ingredient for wide public acceptance of artificial intelligence and other emerging data technologies down the road.  […]

If you take a close look at the Federal CIO Council website, you’ll likely see some new names serving in leadership positions. […]

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker last Friday requested that Maj. Gen. Donald Dunbar, adjutant general of Wisconsin, put the state’s National Guard cyber response teams on standby ahead of the midterm elections. […]

A majority of surveyed U.S. information and technology professionals–86 percent–are concerned about the public sector’s ability to conduct secure, reliable, and accurate elections, according to a new study from ISACA released today. […]

Vice Admiral Nancy Norton, head of the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and commander of the Joint Force Headquarters Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DODIN), today described DISA’s efforts going into milCloud 2.0 and how they support Federal data center optimization goals. […]

Leveraging the cloud is key to the success of new programs and modernization efforts at the Pentagon, said Department of Defense CIO Dana Deasy and Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Chief Vice Admiral Nancy Norton during DISA’s Forecast to Industry conference on Monday. […]

TechCongress, a nonpartisan initiative, is using a $1 million investment from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to “increase government knowledge of emerging technology issues and inform policymaking,” according to a Knight Foundation press release dated Nov. 2. […]

Hybrid clouds can be an integral part of government agencies’ information technology modernization strategies by helping to provide consistency across on-premise and public cloud platforms to ease migration, integration, and operation across the platforms. […]