With President Biden’s Cybersecurity Executive Order adding urgency to requirements for Federal agencies to improve cybersecurity by further implementing core tenets of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, a new survey from MeriTalk and Elastic finds that the continued rollout of the next generation of CDM dashboard technology will go a long way toward addressing agency security gaps. […]
President Biden on June 26 pledged his support for a separate voting track in Congress for legislation containing a $1.2 trillion compromise infrastructure agreement that the White House reached last week with a bipartisan group of senators. […]
An infrastructure deal reached today by the White House and a bipartisan group of senators features a potentially huge Federal funding bump for cybersecurity as part of a larger “resiliency” section of the agreement, although details of the scope of the cybersecurity portion remain murky until further information about the plan becomes public. […]
The House Appropriations Committee is proposing to fund the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) with $50 million of new money for Fiscal Year 2022, down sharply from the $500 million proposed by the Biden administration in its budget request issued late last month. […]
Federal chief technology officers (CTOs) are working hard on a number of big-picture policy fronts including improving cybersecurity, modernizing technology, adopting cloud computing, and improving the customer experience. […]
The board of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) has been reviewing in recent days proposals from Federal agencies to help fund their efforts to move toward zero trust security architectures, according to Matt Hartman, who is Deputy Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and also a member of the TMF board. […]
With the focus turning to securing critical infrastructure and a backdrop of an increased number of cyberattacks, a survey of the cybersecurity in the water and waste management sector shows a number of facilities with incomplete cybersecurity programs, the Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) found in an April 2021 study. […]
The cybersecurity executive order (EO) signed by President Joe Biden is requiring Federal agencies to make plans for implementing zero trust architectures to strengthen cybersecurity postures and the directive is being largely seen as a positive by agency experts. […]
The road to Federal agencies implementing zero trust security architecture – one of the overriding goals of President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order – leads unavoidably through completion of the transition to a network infrastructure that relies on all-IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) address protocols, Federal IT officials emphasized today. […]
The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program that aims to improve Federal civilian network defenses is seeing an “extremely busy” 2021 following high-profile cyber breaches targeting government and private-sector networks, and government moves to open up the funding spigot to the program, a senior CDM program official said during MeriTalk’s June 10 “CDM: More Critical Than Ever” webinar. […]
After a Senate committee hearing yesterday, Colonial Pipeline’s president and CEO was back in front of Congress today, appearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security for a hearing about last month’s ransomware attack. There he expressed a need from private industry for the Federal government to pressure the hosts of these ransomware actors. […]
Even before the coronavirus pandemic jolted Federal agencies into a crash course on network modernization, the Federal CIO Council had cooked up its prescient “Networks of the Future” white paper that lays out next-generation network technologies and strategies that provide a roadmap for agencies in the post-pandemic era. […]
Cross-agency collaboration – which has been important to the larger Federal IT mission for years, and became even more so during coronavirus pandemic – is due for further acceleration as the next mechanism in how government works together, Federal officials said on June 7. […]
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has issued a request for information (RFI) to assist the agency in efforts to procure tools, systems, and capabilities to assist in deploying a zero trust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) capability. […]
Congressman Ted W. Lieu, D-Ca., and Congressman Ken Calvert, R-Ca., introduced the Space Infrastructure Act on June 4. This bill directs the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to designate space systems, services, and technology as a critical infrastructure sector. […]
The Biden administration is pushing hard to help fight the rise of ransomware attacks on private industry, and the White House is taking steps on multiple fronts to work with the private sector to combat the issue. […]
The continued flurry of high-profile ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure targets in the United States is climbing the ladder of presidential priorities – with President Biden saying it’s on the agenda for his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin later this month, and White House officials confirming that cryptocurrency will be part of a new examination of global corruption. […]
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., and several chairs of the panel’s key subcommittees today asked inspectors general (IGs) from ten Federal agencies for assessments of any cybersecurity vulnerabilities that were created or worsened by the use of telework systems during the coronavirus pandemic, and whether any such vulnerabilities have been mitigated. […]
A senior official with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said today the Federal government’s process of modernizing its IT systems to achieve better cybersecurity may be a decades-long process. […]
The Biden administration is publicly demonstrating its willingness to lend Federal help to respond to a variety of ransomware assaults against critical infrastructure sectors – the latest involving a cyberattack against JBS USA, the world’s largest meatpacker, that forced the company reportedly to shut down nine of its plants. […]
President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris submitted the President’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 budget request to congress which includes $715 billion of which is allocated for the Department of Defense (DoD) to bolster the Pentagon’s technological capabilities, among other objectives. […]
President Biden’s Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 budget includes an estimated $58.439 billion in IT spending for Federal civilian agencies, and $500 million for the General Service Administration’s (GSA) Technology Modernization Fund (TMF), according to a budget breakdown the White House released today. […]
Action on the Biden administration’s $1.7 trillion infrastructure spending proposal that debuted in late March as the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan is sliding well into June as the White House and Republican senators have traded offers and counteroffers on the legislation, but still remain deeply divided on the scope of the bill and its price tag. […]
Following a string of high-profile cyber attacks against private sector and government organizations over the past several months, more than half of Americans surveyed by The Harris Poll believe further cybersecurity investments are essential to combat the threat, and that the Federal government, the military, and the private sector should share cyber threat and attack data to help in the fight. […]
A group of tech trade groups is telling Congress that the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) needs a larger budget next year to start putting in place long-term security improvements to meet the rising tide of sophisticated cyberattacks against government and industry. […]
The Endless Frontier bill championed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and set for Senate floor debate over the next several days has grown by leaps and bounds this week with the addition of semiconductor manufacturing and cybersecurity components and has even gotten a new name – the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021. […]
Federal CIO Clare Martorana today laid out her vision for civilian government-wide Federal IT improvements that match up broadly with many of the larger goals outlined in projects and spending priorities announced earlier this month for the recent $1 billion cash infusion into the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). In her first extended public policy address […]
The Defense Department’s (DoD) top cybersecurity official said at the RSA Cybersecurity Conference today that the agency’s current efforts to implement zero trust security concepts represent a “game changer” in the Pentagon’s network security efforts, but emphasized that traditional perimeter and layered defenses remain as important as ever in DoD’s big-picture security strategy. […]
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) on May 13 released the initial Defense Department (DoD) Zero Trust Reference Architecture that aims to boost cybersecurity and “maintain information superiority on the digital battlefield.” […]
Federal agency progress in implementing the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program would benefit from a kick-start from Congress in the form of more funding for the program, along with money for agencies that have to pay for the additional security capabilities on an ongoing basis. […]