The Census Bureau found nearly 3,100 security weaknesses after testing 33 of its 44 systems, leaving a large amount of work to be done before the 2020 Census, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the agency’s IT systems. […]

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is updating two of its major publications regarding mobile device security, and NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) is expanding into uncharted territory. […]

President Trump today announced his intention to freeze Federal civilian pay increases for calendar-year 2019.  That plan, contained in a letter to congressional leaders, reflects President Trump’s call for a civilian federal employee wage freeze in his FY19 budget proposal. […]

All 23 of the Federal civilian CFO Act agencies covered under the Department of Homeland Security’s Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Program will be connected to the governmentwide cybersecurity threat dashboard by September, CDM Program Manager Kevin Cox said today. […]

The State Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a new report that flags security control issues for a data analytics test network and internal case management system operated by the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Office of Fraud Prevention Programs (OFPP), and reported that OFPP is taking steps to resolve the problem. […]

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) inspector general found that a share folder within one of the agency’s regions did not meet National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) standards for account management, which left sensitive data at risk. […]

For the U.S. military, which regularly supports relief efforts around the globe, the demands for assistance are prompting a search for ways to improve the efficiency of relief operations, and military leaders are turning to artificial intelligence for help. […]

Cybersecurity officials must balance strategic thinking on issues such as training and collaboration amid the tactical challenges of finding enough cyber professionals and funding, said Federal government executives during a panel at the Digital Government Institute’s 930Gov event on August 28. […]

News out of the Australian government this month provided a glaring reminder that the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain isn’t software vulnerabilities or patching cycles, it’s the person behind the keyboard. […]

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) today issued a memo rescinding previous guidance it gave to Federal agencies to enforce certain provisions of three executive orders (EO) issued by President Trump regarding the Federal workforce, after those provisions were deemed unlawful by a U.S. District Court Judge last Saturday. […]

John Noble, former director of the National Cyber Security Centre in the United Kingdom, took a pessimistic view on the future of cybersecurity during a BeyondTrust webinar on Wednesday. […]

The ransomware attack on the city of Atlanta in March of this year, which brought down numerous online city services for several days, should be seen as a warning for similar attacks on municipalities in the future with even more drastic impacts as city services become more reliant on IT systems, a senior Department of Homeland Security official said Tuesday. […]

Government use of facial recognition technology put one in the win column last week, when U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers nabbed a man using a fake passport to enter the country at Dulles International Airport in Virginia. […]

As the Federal government modernizes its technology, IT executives must help guide employees through that transformation and help them adjust to shifting roles in IT, said a panel of Federal technology executives at Digital Government Institute’s 930Gov conference on Tuesday. […]

Matthew Travis, deputy undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security’s National Programs and Protection Directorate (NPPD), said today that DHS’s recently-established National Risk Management Center (NRMC) represents the agency’s plan to play “the long game” in defending U.S. critical infrastructure sectors from attacks. […]

The General Services Administration has tapped the Department of Education to share with other Federal agencies Education’s successes in adopting the Technology Business Management (TBM) framework to arrive at a holistic understanding of IT processes, according to representatives of Education’s Office of the CIO. […]

Federal CIO Suzette Kent said today that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is working with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to update metrics for Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) reporting, and said that agencies are seeing progress in those metrics, which are being tracked in a newly added category in the Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) scorecard. […]

Multiple IT projects gained funding as the Senate passed H.R. 6157, the FY 2019 minibus appropriations bill for the departments of Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education on Aug. 23. The bill passed the Senate on an 85-7 vote.  The House approved its version of the legislation on June 28, setting up a House-Senate conference committee to reconcile differences in the two bills.   […]

Defense Secretary James Mattis in May urged President Trump to create a “whole of country” national strategy to advance U.S. development of artificial intelligence technologies, shortly after the White House’s announcement on May 10 of a new AI advisory committee–the Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence–to advise the White House on research and development efforts across government and industry. […]

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Attorney General Jeff Sessions in an Aug. 21 letter to update the Justice Department’s (DoJ) guidance on use of cell-site simulator technologies–sometimes referred to as Stingray devices–to take into account information from a manufacturer that use of the devices may completely disrupt communications of targeted phones including emergency 911 calls and other features.   […]

U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Federal district court for the District of Columbia issued a ruling Saturday that struck down key provisions of President Trump’s three executive orders related to the Federal workforce, which were issued in May and which agencies largely began implementing early last month. […]

As the Pentagon rushes headlong into putting artificial intelligence into more of its operations, analyses, and weapons, it has said it doesn’t want to ignore caution flags about putting too much faith in the power of machines. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wants to help with that, posting an array of those flags in a white paper that offers guidance to military use of AI and includes of list of its shortcomings and where it can go wrong. […]

The General Services Administration’s Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract aims to aid modernization, support secure connections through various methods, and allow agencies to focus better on their mission, according to participants on a webinar titled “Building and Securing Government’s Connected Future with EIS,” hosted by FedInsider and sponsored by CenturyLink. […]

Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., this week introduced legislation that would take several steps to curb the ability of Chinese companies to impact the U.S. technology supply chain and profit from alleged theft of U.S. intellectual property. […]

The U.S. Navy on Thursday awarded five firms a potential seven-year, $950 billion contract for “Cyber Mission Systems, kitting, and supplies.” […]

The military services are mirroring the approach of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which seeks to accelerate the development of new technologies. This would be accomplished through collaboration with companies large and small, old and new. It has been so successful that earlier this month it got to remove the “x” from its name, as it’s no longer a temporary experiment. […]

On the heels of Kelly Olson’s promotion to head the General Services Administration’s Technology and Transformation Services (TTS) organization (LINK to yesterday’s story), the agency is setting into motion a series of leadership changes impacting its FedRAMP operation, among others. […]

The former chief security officer at Facebook urged in a column published today on the “Lawfare” blog that the U.S. consider creating an independent, “defense-only” cybersecurity agency to deal with defense of election systems and processes that may come under attack by adversaries. […]

Jonathan Dowling, co-director of the Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics at Louisiana State University, said today at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Army Science and Technology Symposium that conservative estimates put the world’s first universal quantum computer at about a decade away from becoming a reality. […]

Brian Sadler, senior scientist for intelligent systems at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, today discussed how the expanse of artificial intelligence (AI) research activities across the Army is bringing to light even greater challenges. […]