Senior Federal IT experts – including the current and former Federal CISO and the Pentagon’s top IT official – are expressing broad agreement that the necessary ingredients are at hand to begin implementing zero trust security concepts for government networks, and that the time to act is now. […]
While a clear majority of stakeholders in the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program believe that CDM is more important than ever in defending against cyber breaches, only a small fraction praise CDM for its ability to build civilian government network resilience following a breach. […]
Three Democratic senators today asked the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the General Services Administration (GSA) to take a “flexible” approach in deploying $1 billion of new Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) money for Federal agencies to use to improve their IT systems, including adjusting or removing requirements for agencies to reimburse the TMF with savings generated from projects that get money from the fund. […]
Kevin Cox, who has led by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program for the past five-plus years, will be leaving the agency later this year to take on deputy CIO duties at the Department of Justice (DoJ). […]
While House Government Operations Subcommittee members offered no firm direction on how they may try to further evolve the FITARA Scorecard, their discussions with witnesses at the April 16 hearing on version 11.0 of the scorecard issued last December brought to light a variety of Federal agency IT concerns that might come into play. […]
Federal agency leaders agree that zero trust is a journey that will take time to implement but, with modern-day cyber threats, the sooner agencies implement zero trust the better. […]
The Federal government is curtailing its “surge” response to the SolarWinds Orion and Microsoft Exchange hacks after seeing improvements in patching that have helped to remediate the impacts of the cyber attacks, the Biden administration said today. […]
The FITARA 11.0 scorecard released in December 2020 turned out to be a pretty good report card for Federal agency IT operations. The latest set of grades marked just the second time since the House Oversight and Reform Committee started measuring agency progress against Federal Information Technology Reform Act (FITARA) and other key metrics that every agency received a passing score. […]
The top members of the House Government Operations Subcommittee indicated today that Federal IT modernization – and the role that the newly expanded Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) can play in furthering that goal – loom large in their thinking as they consider the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s ongoing tracking of Federal agency IT improvements via the FITARA Scorecard. […]
On April 15, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., released a discussion draft of legislation that would regulate the exportation of American citizen’s sensitive, personal information to adversarial nations. […]
Bipartisan leadership of the House Government Operations Subcommittee introduced a bill today that would make sure Federal agency CIOs – along with chief data, financial, and human capital officers – are wrapped into the process of how agency leaders craft performance plans for their organizations. […]
At the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), cybersecurity is at the forefront of mission goals that include transitioning to cloud systems, a new cyber training regimen for USPTO remote examiners, and a new insider threat program, and agency official said April 14. […]
Ann Dunkin, who served as CIO at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) during the second Obama administration, is in line to become CIO at the Department of Energy (DoE), knowledgeable sources tell MeriTalk. […]
A group of communications technology trade groups urged Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo in an April 12 letter to stick by what they called the Federal government’s “longstanding commitment” to use industry-led standards and best practices to deal with cybersecurity and supply chain security issues facing the information communications technology (ICT) sector. […]
The House Government Operations Subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for April 16 at 9:30 a.m. to examine compliance with the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA). […]
The Biden administration’s Fiscal Year 2022 discretionary funding request submitted to Congress on April 9 features $1.25 billion of new requests that would be aimed at undertaking further Federal IT modernization efforts. […]
Amid the widespread misery and dislocation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the few bright spots has been on the Federal technology front, where the imperative to adopt a range of remote processes including widespread telework has helped push Federal agency operations farther into the future. […]
Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat said today that the Federal government is making progress on a number of fronts in its digital-first strategy to improve the delivery of citizen services, but needs to pursue “sustained modernization” of IT services to continue driving change for the better. […]
Back in December 2019, months before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a draft document of its Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) 3.0 guidance. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is partnering with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Defense and other entities to recognize National Supply Chain Integrity Month and promote a call to action for strengthening global supply chains. […]
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on March 31 previewed six “sprints” planned by DHS and its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) component throughout 2021 to bolster Federal cybersecurity across a range of areas including ransomware, industrial control system (ICS) security, and workforce development. […]
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released supplemental directions to help agencies root out and mitigate vulnerabilities in their Microsoft Exchange on-premises products. […]
Cybersecurity experts stressed this week that Federal agencies must keep stay focused on future threats and on moving toward adoption of zero trust security concepts, although they acknowledged that the latter tasks is “easier said than done.” […]
Acting Defense Department (DoD) CIO John Sherman said he has set his sights on generating faster progress on implementation of zero trust security concepts throughout DoD as a key follow-up to the agency’s success in facilitating rapid and widespread telework during the coronavirus pandemic. […]
The year-plus of societal misery and dislocation wrought by the coronavirus pandemic has helped to deliver two mega-trends to the Federal government IT landscape that will far outlast the public health crisis. The first is the permanence of remote work, and second is the urgent need to evolve IT security to defend expanded attack surfaces against increasingly sophisticated adversaries. […]
The White House named Nabeela Barbari, a national security veteran, to President Biden’s National Security Council (NSC). Barbari will serve on the NSC as the nation’s director of resilience and response. […]
The COVID-19 pandemic forced Federal agencies to shift to majority telework in a matter of days. Over the last 12 months, agencies have had to rapidly learn how to keep their networks secure in a new work environment. […]
The Biden administration is proposing that the Federal government take a giant leap into the national broadband service market – traditionally the province of the private sector – in order to close persistent service availability and affordability gaps across the United States. […]
The Biden Administration today proposed in its $2 trillion American Jobs Plan to invest upwards of $90 billion in Federal government-directed research and development (R&D) spending in a host of technology areas including AI. […]
When it comes to modernization and innovation for Federal agencies, the U.S. Air Force (USAF) is emphasizing that software and cybersecurity are foundational to its digital modernization strategy. […]