NTCA–The Rural Broadband Association, a broadband industry group that represents more than 800 independent and community-based telecommunications companies in rural and small-town America, announced Friday that it elected new board members at its fall board meeting. […]
Like other military services and Department of Defense components, the Air Force is finding itself overloaded these days with streaming intelligence data, and is looking to machine learning and artificial intelligence to help its analysts quickly put all that information to practical use. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs faced congressional scrutiny on Thursday for delayed payments to veterans following the passage of the Colmery Act, also known as the Forever GI Bill, as House members called on VA IT officials to explain how the system could not handle the additional workloads and criticized the department’s response. […]
A lack of incentives for House members, and a declining count of professional committee and member staff with the necessary experience, are combining to dampen oversight activities in the House, panelists said Nov. 16 at an event organized by the Project On Government Oversight (POGO). […]
Michael Horowitz, inspector general of the Justice Department and chair of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), said today that the Oversight.gov website launched by CIGIE now has reports from 70 of the 73 Federal inspectors general, up from 67 IGs when the site was unveiled about a year ago. […]
Creation of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)–long a goal of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to stand up a dedicated component agency focused on cybersecurity–became a reality Friday as President Trump signed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018 into law. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) plans on proposing new rules in the Federal Register next spring for Federal contractors that would put the responsibility on contractors to report any cyber incident that potentially compromises systems or information owned by the government. […]
In a letter released Thursday, Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., questioned the Trump administration’s commitment to election security and pressed administration officials to communicate more clearly with Congress about the issue. […]
The Office of Financial Research (OFR), which is an independent bureau within the Department of the Treasury, said in its 2018 Annual Report to Congress on Thursday that cybersecurity “a key risk” to U.S. financial stability. […]
Bulgarian police announced Nov. 8 that they have arrested Alexander Zhukov, a Russian national and suspected cybercriminal, on behalf of the United States. […]
Lesley Field, the acting administrator of the Office of Federal Procurement Policy within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), laid out the key areas where OMB is trying to improve IT acquisition, and detailed the initiatives underway. […]
Federal agencies need to get into second gear in their efforts to defend against insider threats, as outlined in the “Insider Threat Program Maturity Framework” released this month by the National Insider Threat Task Force (NITTF). Agencies must move past the minimum standards many have established and become more proactive in countering what the task force said is a dynamic threat that has moved beyond basic defenses, according to the framework. […]
The private sector is the prime driver for Congress to take up data privacy legislation in 2019, industry panelists said Thursday at an event organized by Bloomberg Government. […]
The National Institute of Standards and Technology on Nov. 13 published a Request for Information seeking comment on its “NIST Privacy Framework: An Enterprise Risk Management Tool” that the agency expects to issue in early 2019. […]
Speaking at an event organized by Bloomberg Government, Rep. Eshoo indicated that her concerns are rooted in the impact of social media and other content that inspires or leads to violence such as the Oct. 27 murders at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. […]
IT officials from the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) detailed progress their agencies have made so far in utilizing grants awarded by the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), and highlighted the benefits of TMF funding including the ability to repay the working capital fund through cost savings. […]
Rep. Mike McCaul, R-Texas, who will be stepping aside in January as chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee after leading the panel since 2013, said today he expects the committee’s core policy interests and aims will continue under the direction of the panel’s incoming chairman, presumably the current ranking member Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) announced Wednesday that the GSA Federal Acquisition Service (FAS) Information Technology Category (ITC), IT Schedule 70 program is restructuring its Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services (HACS) Special Item Numbers (SINs). […]
Cybersecurity industry leaders and former military cyber experts told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that the Pentagon needs to adopt more commercial cybersecurity technology. […]
In a report released Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could do more to expand broadband access on tribal lands. The GAO offered three recommendations to the FCC, which the agency agreed with. […]
The State of North Carolina, Cisco and industry partners will work together to implement a cybersecurity training initiative for veterans in the state, as the state announced today. […]
Senior officials from the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Homeland Security (DHS) told House members on Wednesday that they are busy working out details of a recently finalized cybersecurity coordination agreement focused on improving Federal government cyber defenses generally, and specifically the cyber defenses of critical infrastructure components on which DoD facilities rely, among other areas. […]
The Department of Defense’s Inspector General took the agency to task in a Nov. 8 report that says four DoD components failed to fully implement the 2015 Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) which aims to encourage sharing of cybersecurity threat data between the government and the private sector. […]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) launched a new challenge, called the Career Compass Challenge, to try and tackle the cyber and technology workforce shortage in the Federal government. […]
Fraudsters are using the U.S. Postal Services’ (USPS’) Informed Delivery service to perpetrate a multitude of identity theft and credit card fraud schemes, according to an alert the Secret Service sent its law enforcement partners on Nov. 6. […]
Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., highlighted the benefits of broadband services for rural areas, and with Democratic control of the House coming in January, offered an optimistic view on the prospects of bipartisan broadband expansion legislation. […]
The House Committee on Veterans Affairs’ Subcommittee on Technology Modernization met today to review the first 180 days of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (VA) Electronic Health Record Modernization (EHRM) program, with members of Congress anxious to see evidence of progress in the program and VA officials offering some details that point in that direction. […]
Alex Measure, senior economist at the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)–who has developed and deployed an artificial intelligence application to help the agency analyze workforce health data–said on Tuesday that convincing agency leaders to pursue AI applications can be the toughest part of the development and deployment journey. […]
Federal agency officials said on Tuesday that internal work to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is picking up, but also cautioned that the still-experimental nature of those efforts makes it difficult to predict when products and services will emerge from them. […]
The House late Tuesday approved long-pending legislation that authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to reorganize its existing National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD) in order to create a new component agency–the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency–within DHS. […]