Acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan announced on Feb. 8 that he was nominating Lt. Gen. VeraLinn “Dash” Jamieson to serve as Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and cyber effects operations. […]

In a global cybersecurity report released Wednesday from Comparitech, the United States was ranked the fifth most secure country. […]

While there is no doubt that the House Intelligence Committee will continue to concern itself with relevant cybersecurity issues, that would not be obvious from this week’s announcement of changes to the panel’s subcommittee structure. […]

Government and policy-makers shouldn’t put up unnecessary barriers to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) over concern of any perceived risks associated with the technology. […]

Less than two weeks after the end of the partial Federal government shutdown and with the looming threat of another such disruption coming on Feb. 15, will Federal government IT officials in large numbers be making the trip out west to the U.S.’s preeminent cybersecurity conference next month? […]

Moving more than a half-million email accounts to Microsoft Office 365 is a pretty big deal, but for the Air Force, it was just the first step in a journey toward an enterprise migration to bring a suite of cloud-based communication and collaboration tools to outposts around the world. […]

Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Dan Sullivan, R-Ark., reintroduced legislation on Tuesday that would “establish an international information sharing program on election administration and security at the State Department.” The Global Electoral Exchange Act, which had been introduced in the last Congress, would enable the United States to work with its international allies to strengthen election security by sharing best practices on audits, disinformation campaigns, and voter database protections–among other pertinent issues. […]

The call last week by the Pentagon’s top tester to temporarily halt deployment of the Department of Defense’s Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) wasn’t exactly out of the blue. The DoD’s independent Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) said the same thing in its annual report last year, while citing some of the same problems, such as staffing shortages, difficulty in integrating disparate commercial technologies, and the lack of mature standard operating processes. […]

The Department of Defense Cloud Strategy released this week emphasizes the importance of the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) cloud contract in the computing environment of the Pentagon. […]

The Defense Department’s newly published cloud strategy leans heavily on several core concepts including maximizing competition among cloud service providers, sticking to a single cloud strategy, leveraging commercial-sector best practices, creating a culture for better technology evolution, and above all else supporting warfighters and increasing their lethality. […]

Department of Defense (DoD) and private sector leaders gathered to discuss the state of cybersecurity in the U.S. military during a Tuesday Federal Executive Forum webinar. […]

The Department of Defense published an unclassified version of its long-awaited cloud strategy Monday afternoon, which features an enterprise cloud environment that includes “general-purpose” and “fit-for-purpose” cloud infrastructures achieved through multiple vendors, and identifies seven strategic objectives for the effort. […]

The Internet Security Alliance (ISA) announced Monday that it hired Dan Lips as its new assistant vice president. […]

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has tapped John Brown for a promotion, according to a report from The Hill. […]

In a letter on Friday, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., questioned Steven Dillingham, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, over how nearly $5 billion in IT costs are being managed by the Bureau. His concerns come as IT costs grew by $1.56 billion between October 2015 and December 2017. […]

If recent events are any indication, we could be seeing big changes to agency cloud migration plans in 2019. The Federal government could be rethinking its role in owning and operating its own data centers, strongly questioning whether that is a job best left to government employees. […]

Maria Roat, chief information officer at the Small Business Administration, provided a run-down of her office’s extensive to-do list during a keynote address on Thursday at the Veritas Public Sector Vision Day event, and emphasized the importance of laying the proper data-management policy groundwork before embarking on cloud deployments and forays into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]

The Bank Policy Institute, a nonpartisan public policy, research, and advocacy group, announced Thursday that it has hired Kenice Middleton to be its new senior vice president of cybersecurity risk management. […]

Valimail said in a report issued Friday that use of the Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance protocol (DMARC) is growing in both the public and private sectors, likely helped by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mandating its adoption across Federal agencies. DMARC is an email authentication protocol that verifies the authenticity of an email’s sender in order to prevent spoofing and phishing. […]

Federal IT leaders discussed challenges within their agencies of overcoming divergent cultural views to data sharing during Veritas’ Public Sector Vision Day on Thursday. […]

From a cybersecurity perspective, the strengths of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are also weaknesses. The capacity to crunch massive amounts of data, identify patterns, and learn while working covers a lot of territory, but also leaves room for vulnerabilities, which Pentagon and Intelligence Community (IC) researchers want to close up. And the job doesn’t look easy. […]

Jordan Rae Kelly is now a senior managing director in the cybersecurity practice for FTI Consulting. Kelly was previously the director for cyber incident response at the National Security Council (NSC). […]

In the face of increased public scrutiny and increased calls for Congressional oversight into the social media giant’s cybersecurity habits, Facebook has made quite a few new cybersecurity hires. […]

A new report from cybersecurity firm Security Scorecard released this week found that the partial Federal government shutdown had minimal negative effects on Federal network security, and even found some positive impacts on patching and endpoint security. […]

The House on Tuesday passed H.R. 769, the Counterterrorism Advisory Board Act of 2019, which would establish a board at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to coordinate and integrate departmental intelligence, activities, and policy related to counterterrorism. […]

The Department of Defense puts a lot of effort into cybersecurity but still has some significant holes in its structure, some of them dating back a decade, according to a report issued earlier this month by the department’s Inspector General (IG). […]

The U.S. Marine Corps (USMC) has extended the deadline on a request for information for cloud migration services, with the goal of closing multiple data centers and moving a suite of applications to a commercial cloud environment. The RFI is open until February 20. […]

During the State of the Net 2019 Conference, cybersecurity experts zeroed in on how the shutdown impacted not only the United States’ cybersecurity posture but also the Federal government’s cybersecurity workforce. […]

A former Assistant Secretary for Infrastructure Protection at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said Thursday she believes that while the agency’s core cybersecurity operations are holding up through the partial Federal government shutdown, other important IT security initiatives appear to be lying fallow until the agency receives funding to operate and pay its employees. […]

With the 116th session of Congress now well underway, committee and subcommittee rosters are being finalized. For those in the Fed IT world, there are a few committee assignments to pay attention to. […]