For the second time in recent weeks, Congress is looking to spend $1 billion or more to help make the Huawei problem go away. […]

Sens. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., John Cornyn, R-Texas, Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Gary Peters, D-Mich., introduced legislation on Jan. 16 that directs the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to establish a Cybersecurity State Coordinator program. […]

Proactive work by Federal agencies on cybersecurity – with a particular focus on workforce, innovation, and data management – is a key factor in agency success in protecting patient data from security threats, Federal officials said on Jan. 16. […]

The latest “Hack the Army” effort has awarded $275,000 in prizes and identified more than 145 security vulnerabilities. […]

Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I., co-chair of the Congressional Cybersecurity Caucus, applauded the Federal government’s handling earlier this week of public disclosure by the intelligence community of serious vulnerabilities it found in Microsoft’s Windows 10 and Service 2016 products, for which the company released patches. […]

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) CIO Jose Arrieta said Accelerate will be able to save the department “somewhere around $33 to $40 million” over the next five years. […]

On December 3, join MeriTalk for our third annual CDM Central Conference, where we’ll discuss not just CDM, but top of mind cyber issues and initiatives. Our virtual arena will showcase how A-team cyber defenders are ramping up CDM capabilities to protect High Value Assets (HVAs), defending the perimeter, building cyber strength, preparing the workforce, and more. […]

In establishing an agency’s cloud transformation, the General Services Administration (GSA) can provide lessons in setting up the transition. […]

The House Committee on Financial Services passed H.R. 4458, The Cybersecurity and Financial System Resilience Act of 2019, via voice vote on Jan. 13. […]

In a nearly three hour hearing, the Committee on House Administration heard expert testimony regarding U.S. election security, with a specific focus on voting system security. […]

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has invited eight companies to participate as technology collaborators in the Securing the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT): Cybersecurity for Distributed Energy Resources Project (DERS). […]

Rising political and military tensions between the United States and Iran have led to renewed calls for securing government and private-sector critical systems in the event that the conflict leads to malicious cyber activity against U.S. assets. […]

Nearly one million active military personnel and veterans have been the target of scams that have cost them about $405 million since 2012, according to a report from Comparitech. […]

The present and future state of Federal IT has monumental challenges to address – modernization, data utilization, and automation just to name a few – but none are so critical, or enduring, as cybersecurity. It’s the threat that will never fully go away – and where eternal vigilance, and innovation, are the price of liberty. […]

The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) that took effect earlier this week will not only erect a higher data privacy bar for citizens of the state, but also may put an important policy stake in the ground for Federal lawmakers who are weighing nationwide data privacy legislation. […]

Industry leaders shared their predictions for 2020 and beyond with MeriTalk, indicating the path to progress will often track uphill, and around plenty of curves. […]

Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich., and Rick Scott, R-Fla., have introduced a bill in the Senate that would establish a K-12 cybersecurity education initiative. […]

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced new cloud contracts with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft to provide easier access to environmental data sets. […]

The U.S. Air Force plans to release a solicitation to help the service branch optimize and modernize its Hill Enterprise Data Center (HEDC) in Utah while supporting a hybrid cloud environment and meeting requirements under the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI), as noted in a beta.SAM.gov post. […]

Focusing on the “compute” equation – instead of only prioritizing data center closures – is an important consideration in Federal agencies’ execution of the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI), General Services Administration (GSA) Senior Adviser Stephen Naumann explained at a Dec. 18 ACT-IAC meeting. […]

18F, the digital services delivery hub of the General Services Administration, launched a National Security and Intelligence Portfolio to help national defense agencies acquire new digital solutions, according to a Dec. 10 post on the agency’s blog. […]

The Treasury Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) reported that the agency’s cyber threat indicators in Calendar Year (CY) 2017 and CY2018 were “adequate and aligned with the provisions of CISA [the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2015]” in an audit released on Dec. 10. […]

For agencies pursuing new ways to share and manage data, Government Accountability Office (GAO) Director of IT and Cybersecurity Nick Marinos recommends focusing on the agency’s mission and incorporating security early on in the process. […]

The President’s National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) recommended “urgent and comprehensive action” on cyber threats to critical infrastructure in a draft of its Dec. 12 memo to the White House. […]

While figures vary across industry and government as to the size of the “phishing-prone” population in any organization, both sides agree that sustained internal employee training efforts are necessary to cut the success rate of spear-phishing exploits down to more manageable levels. […]

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposed Dec. 4 to create a $9 billion fund to support the deployment of 5G wireless services in rural portions of the U.S. The proposal would require approval from a majority of the full five-member commission, with a vote likely sometime in 2020. […]

Access to valuable data and the transition to cloud infrastructure could help the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) access life-saving procedures for patients across the country, according to a presentation by HHS CIO José Arrieta at FCW Workshop: Health IT on Dec. 4. […]

We sat down with ViON’s EVP of Operations Rob Davies, and Dan Fallon, Senior Director of Public Sector Systems Engineering at Nutanix, to discuss how to best manage high-performance applications that are part of a multi-cloud strategy, and the key considerations every agency leader should be evaluating in that equation. […]

The Cybersecurity Tech Accord (CTA), an international, industry-led effort by technology and security companies to combat cyberattacks, today announced a new contest to improve internet cybersecurity. […]

While most Federal agency IT decision makers say their agencies are already edging into using multi-cloud platforms, the learning curve to getting comfortable with multi-cloud appears to remain steep, and most say that managing the multi-cloud environment is likely to be a top challenge over the next five years. […]