Congressional staffers on House and Senate committees with strong interest in cybersecurity issues said today they are watching for “low-hanging fruit” in the form of easy-to-enact legislative proposals expected to make up some of the recommendations in the Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC) report set to be released on March 11. […]
In a report released Feb. 25, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that “most” of nine agencies tasked with protecting the 16 critical infrastructure sectors “have not developed methods to determine the level and type of adoption of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.” […]
Leaders from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shared how the agency’s acquisition process fueled successful IT transformation in projects like Accelerate at the Feb. 26 ServiceNow Federal Forum. […]
The Offices of Inspectors General (OIG) for the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) are planning to begin a joint audit to determine what actions taken by the DoD and VA in acquiring and implementing a common, commercial electronic health record system. […]
A senior official speaking Feb. 26 at the RSA Conference clarified recent steps by the State Department to publicly attribute and condemn acts of cyber aggression on the part of Russia, calling the actions of the Department part of a deliberate attempt to establish a framework for appropriate nation-state behavior in cyberspace. […]
Federal officials from the Defense Department (DoD), Justice Department (DoJ), and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Feb. 25 totaled up the sobering costs of intellectual property theft from U.S. interests in recent years, and pointed to strategies their agencies are pursuing to put a dent into that total going forward. […]
State and local election officials said at the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Feb. 24 that Federal election assistance funding has been vital to their efforts to shore up election infrastructure security over the past few years. […]
A group of public sector cybersecurity leaders, speaking on a panel Feb. 24 at the RSA Public Sector Day event, discussed the challenge of reconciling competing priorities when assessing both the business value and mission value of cybersecurity investments. […]
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs pledged today that there is no issue drawing more focus and attention at the Federal government level than election security leading up to the 2020 elections later this year. […]
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) will hold its next Technological Advisory Council (TAC) meeting on March 24 at the FCC headquarters. […]
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its 2019 Privacy and Data Security Update that highlighted “a record year for enforcement actions aimed at protecting consumer privacy and data security.” […]
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the Cybersecurity Vulnerability Identification and Notification Act of 2020 (H.R. 5680) could slightly lower the deficit, but not by a significant amount. The bill, introduced by Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I. on Jan. 27, would authorize the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue administrative subpoenas in rare […]
Sean Plankey, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity, Energy, Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) at the Department of Energy (DoE), today outlined solutions to cybersecurity skills gaps in the industrial controls sector as security for that sector continues to change from older “manual-mode” methods to more modern technologies. […]
Since 2014, the beginning of CIO Joseph Klimavicz’s tenure, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has achieved $600 million in IT cost avoidance, reduced cyber risk by 70 percent, and streamlined its 23 email systems into one cloud-based solution. […]
Sixty-four Federal agencies have experimented with artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) techniques, a new report, submitted to the Administrative Conference of the United States, shows. […]
Oki Mek, senior adviser to the CIO at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), on Feb. 20 discussed the agency’s current effort to draft a cloud strategy, and the importance of going forward with a unified strategy that guides the entire organization. […]
Sean Connelly, Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) program manager at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), said this week his office expects to issue finalized documents sometime this spring for version 3.0 of the TIC initiative. The agency issued draft guidance documents for TIC 3.0 late last year. […]
The House of Representatives is looking to strengthen public safety network resiliency with two new pieces of legislation. […]
A senior General Services Administration (GSA) official said today the agency is supportive of the primary aims of a new report recommending steps to modernize the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. […]
Simplified workflows and modernized systems are changing the way Federal agencies meet their missions, and ServiceNow is leading the way to a more service-focused government. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on deepfakes, a technology which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and can depict someone appearing to say or do something they never did. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) IT Reform Act of 2019 passed the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Feb. 13, paving the way for its move to the Senate floor. […]
For Yemi Oshinnaiye, Deputy Chief Information Officer at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), DevOps is a movement toward a workplace culture that increases flow. It’s about getting things to the user faster, said Oshinnaiye, speaking today at the DevOps Forum hosted by the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) […]
According to checks with conference organizers, the show will go on, and Federal government officials are still planning to travel to the conference next week despite concerns about the coronavirus that are keeping at least some others away. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) launched a new, mobile-friendly version of its public-facing website Feb. 13. […]
The American Council for Technology-Industry Advisory Council (ACT-IAC) organization released a DevOps Primer today to guide Federal government in utilizing DevOps to support its mission. […]
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is moving to a new headquarters building near Union Station in Washington, D.C. as a “big component” of its current IT modernization journey, according to CIO Francisco Salguero. […]
The Department of Agriculture (USDA) is not regularly assessing the effectiveness and impact of its business centers, a key part of the agency’s reform efforts, and has no plans to do so, the Government Accountability Office reported on Feb. 19. […]
Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Ajit Pai announced appointments to serve on three working groups of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment (ACDDE) on Feb. 19. […]
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Director Walter Copan announced Feb. 19 that just one month after the version 1.0 release of the agency’s privacy framework, NIST is already working on a privacy guide for small- and medium-sized businesses. […]