The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) said it fined ride-sharing provider Uber 385,000 pounds (U.S. $490,000) for failing to take adequate steps to protect the personal data of its customers during a cyberattack suffered by the company in 2016. […]

In an Inspector General (IG) report released Nov. 20, the Department of the Interior got taken to task for allowing an employee to visit 9,000 pornographic websites in under seven months. This is the IG second report chastising the department for an employee viewing porn on agency time and technology. […]

The General Services Administration (GSA) released a request for information detailing part of the Federal Acquisition Service’s (FAS’) new CIO Modernization and Enterprise Transformation contract–named COMET for short–and highlighted the guiding principles of cloud-native solutions, SecDevOps, and data management. […]

A draft of the new Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) policy released Monday reorients the focus of DCOI toward optimization–rather than data center consolidations and closures–and revises metrics for the program. […]

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol), meeting last week to consider data protection issues broadly, discussed the importance of protecting digital information and privacy in an era of increasing global terrorism and cybercrime. […]

The Defense Information Services Agency (DISA) is set to release new contracts for classified and unclassified mobility services to accommodate the growth in the area, said Jacob Marcellus, mobility program portfolio manager, during DISA’s 2018 Forecast to Industry event. “We actually have two impending acquisitions, MES-U [Mobility Enterprise Services Unclassified], which will cover all unclassified […]

The U.S. Postal Services (USPS) has fixed a security flaw within its Informed Delivery service that was allowing criminals to perpetrate a multitude of identity theft and credit card fraud schemes. […]

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is looking to use cloud services to speed up the agency’s scientific discoveries and offer researchers more tools through a new program named Exploring Clouds for Acceleration of Science, or E-CAS. […]

An undated draft proposal developed by the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC) for a national “moonshot” to dramatically improve cybersecurity envisions at ten-year horizon to get to the “fundamental goal of making the Internet safe and secure.” […]

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced Tuesday her intention to restore the Elections Subcommittee of the Committee on House Administration, which was created during the 110th Congress but abolished in 2013. Pelosi, who will likely be elected House majority leader when Democrats take control of the House in January, also announced that Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, will serve as chairwoman of the subcommittee. […]

Federal agencies are using the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework to manage their agencies’ cybersecurity risk, a year after the White House issued an executive order directing the heads of executive agencies and departments to use the NIST framework, according to an agency official. […]

The State Department is standing up a cloud program office and taking the opportunity to modernize both systems across the department, according to Brian Merrick, deputy director of cloud program management at the State Department. […]

A report from the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) released Monday argues that devices infected by botnets need to be eliminated. The report proposed increasing regulations and holding more organizations accountable for malicious botnet activity to achieve its goal. […]

On Monday, defense ministers from 25 European Union (EU) countries signed a military pact to create a joint electronic warfare capability project, among other initiatives. […]

The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) on Monday released an interactive tool that consumers, businesses, and governments can use to “measure and quantify” the deployment of the Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) email security protocol. […]

Hackers with ties to the Russian government are using a spear-phishing campaign to impersonate Department of State employees, according to cybersecurity firms FireEye and CrowdStrike. […]

Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud, announced Friday that she will be leaving her post in early 2019–a specific date was not mentioned. […]

The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) on Friday announced that S&T and the Dutch government are each putting up $1.25 million to fund “collaborative cybersecurity research and development” across five U.S.-Dutch research teams. […]

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. […]

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. […]

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). […]

Join Federal IT leaders at the 2019 ServiceNow Federal Summit on March 4 as we map the path to drive innovation forward and deliver improved citizen service at lower cost. Don’t miss plenary sessions with IT leaders on the front lines, and break outs focused on streamlining IT service management, prioritizing and responding to cyber threats faster, transforming Federal HR, improving customer service management, and much more. […]

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 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. […]

The General Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services Division on Nov. 9 issued a request for information (RFI) in connection with a market survey of firms that would provide “professional services” in support of the cloud.gov platform. […]

In a report released today, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) has yet to implement a full one-third of GAO’s information security recommendations issued to OPM in recent years. […]