The Office of Management and Budget today released a draft of its new Cloud Smart strategy, marking the first update to White House guidance on Federal agency cloud adoption since 2011. With the new draft strategy the administration has broadly highlighted three areas–security, procurement, and workforce–as the foundational areas of the strategy and where it feels that updated guidance is most necessary. […]
A multi-agency appropriations bill signed into law by President Trump on Friday provides funding for a new office at the Department of Energy focused on protecting critical infrastructure, along with a range of smaller IT-related projects. […]
The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Friday that Ruslans Bondars, the operator of counter- antivirus service “Scan4you,” was sentenced to 14 years in prison. […]
A new survey conducted by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, also known as (ISC)², found that 50 percent of well-performing organizations surveyed have successfully recruited government cybersecurity talent. […]
As Federal agencies migrate applications to the cloud, data integration can be a major stumbling block that prevents them from reaping the benefits of cloud services. While agencies are putting more applications in cloud environments, often the underlying technologies connecting these applications are still on-premise. As a result, information technology teams must spend time provisioning and maintaining their middleware infrastructure to avoid performance bottlenecks. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) today announced that it awarded a $2 million contract to HackerOne for the facilitation of GSA’s bug bounty programs. […]
As the administration makes its push to implement reforms and reorganize government under an audacious plan released on June 21, it’s finding modest success in some areas, but has somewhat faltered on initiatives where it did not cultivate appropriate stakeholder engagement. […]
CrowdStrike announced Thursday that it received an agency FedRAMP authorization which it said will allow the company “to significantly expand its footprint in the Federal government to meet demand from Federal agencies for its endpoint protection technologies. […]
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced Thursday that CIO Pamela Dyson will leave the agency to become executive vice president, head of the Technology Group, and CIO at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. […]
Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., has introduced a consumer data privacy bill that would require online service providers to provide “opt-in” rights to consumers whose “sensitive personal information or behavioral data” they collect, store, process, sell, or share with third parties. […]
The National Cyber Strategy policy document released by the White House late Thursday tracks in tone and wording with the tough stance adopted in the Defense Department’s cyber strategy announced earlier this week–including its adoption of a more offensive-minded position than previous written policies–and appears to respond in tone to demands from across the political spectrum that the U.S. fashion policy that will do a better job in creating a deterrence effect against adversaries. […]
The Federal government is continuing its push to update the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative to provide “improved solutions for accessing cloud services while maintaining cybersecurity,” according to the latest progress updates to the President’s Management Agenda (PMA). […]
The general election in 2016 was a watershed moment for Federal, state, and local election officials. […]
As the FCC prepares to vote next week on an order that would make it easier for wireless service providers to deploy small wireless antennas and other infrastructure to speed the deployment of fifth-generation–or 5G–services, two of the agency’s five commissioners discussed the pros and cons of taking that course at an event organized by Politico. […]
The Office of Management and Budget recently released its Q3 FY 2018 progress update to the President’s Management Agenda’s cross-agency priority (CAP) goals, and for CAP goal No. 1, IT Modernization, it appears that there has been a notable progression on cloud adoption in the Federal government. […]
The Office of Management and Budget received more than 40 responses to a request for information (RFI) for its planned Government Effectiveness Advanced Research (GEAR) Center, and today a representative from OMB provided more detail about the RFI’s results, the proposed structure of the new center, and where the currently-unspecified amount of “seed funding” for the center would go in order to support various disciplines including Federal IT modernization. […]
According to a new study prepared for the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the agency’s development of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) has created an estimated $250 billion in economic impact over the last 20 years. […]
Small drones have been a useful tool to the military for years, primarily as a way to provide on-the-spot surveillance. But as hardware and artificial intelligence guidance systems continue to improve, macro- and nano-drones are poised to begin playing a bigger role in contested areas as both friend and foe. […]
The U.S. Navy is now using artificial intelligence to determine when it needs to take birds out of the air and repair their wings before they get clipped. […]
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Wednesday talked up progress that his Blue Origin unit has been making in developing space transportation vehicles and services to several hundred attendees–most of them in uniform–at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space, and Cyber Conference. […]
The Department of the Navy released a request for proposal (RFP) for its Next Generation Enterprise Network (N-GEN) Recompete program on Tuesday–the first of two major RFPs expected for the program. […]
Jane Wiseman, senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, has authored a new report–published Tuesday by the IBM Center for the Business of Government–that finds an apparent lack of chief data officers (CDO) among Federal agencies. […]
Current and former Department of Defense (DoD) officials discussed the benefits of using cloud and modernizing their legacy equipment to help accomplish their mission. […]
Federal, state, and local government IT leaders are preparing to share their own hard-won experiences about planning for and executing broad IT modernization and cloud adoption strategies at the Infor Government Forum in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 25. […]
The Department of Defense released the latest chapter of its cyber strategy on Tuesday, which takes a more offensive stance than its 2015 predecessor and directs DoD to “defend forward, shape the day-to-day competition, and prepare for war” in cyberspace. […]
The Pentagon’s geospatial intelligence analysts, who have admitted in the past that they have more data than they can properly analyze, are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to automate and refine how they sift through massive amounts of imagery from satellites and other sources. […]
The Senate today approved H.R. 6157, a minibus funding bill which provides full-year FY 2019 funding to the departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, and Labor, and provides a continuing resolution for short term funding for the entire Federal government until December. […]
Altaba, which holds Yahoo’s remaining assets following the purchase of the company’s internet assets by Verizon in 2017, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it has reached an agreement in principle to settle consumer class action litigation relating to Yahoo’s disclosures in 2016 and 2017 of data breaches impacting three billion user accounts. […]
Researchers at cybersecurity firm Tenable published an advisory Monday revealing a software vulnerability affecting a popular brand of surveillance cameras, whcih could be exploited to gain access to video feeds and potentially “allow attackers to remotely view feeds and tamper with recordings.” […]
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, today introduced the Advancing Cybersecurity Diagnostics and Mitigation Act in the Senate. The House version of the bill (HR 6443), sponsored by Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, passed the House earlier this month. […]