The Department of Homeland Security’s plan for filling the cyber talent gap is intended to focus on talent, more so than established credentials, which means leaving behind some of the traditional methods of hiring, paying, and retaining skilled employees. At the bottom line, DHS wants to take off the General Schedule handcuffs. […]
The Department of Education announced its intent to extend its current contract for mobility services on Monday due to the delay in the Authority to Operate (ATO) process for vendors on the Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract. […]
A recent audit by the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Office of Inspector General found that GSA’s Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Program Management Office (PMO) has not yet established an adequate structure to assist the Federal government with adoption of secure cloud services. […]
The General Services Administration’s (GSA) move to let contractors use GSA-managed IT systems may have improved IT security, but an Office of Inspector General (OIG) report released last week found that the move violated Federal competition requirements. […]
Norwich University Applied Research Institutes (NUARI) has been awarded $5.9 million by the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) to expand its Distributed Environment for Critical Infrastructure Decision-Making Exercises (DECIDE) cyber-training platform. […]
The Transportation Department’s (DoT) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that the department had the second lowest maturity level for its information security systems, and that its cybersecurity functions were found to be inadequate in a Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) audit released last week. […]
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an alert last week after it was discovered that as many as 750,000 medical heart devices contain critical cybersecurity vulnerabilities. […]
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) mistakenly shared with an unnamed contractor sensitive personal data on 2.3 million victims of several recent hurricanes and California wildfires, the agency’s Office of Inspector General said in a March 15 report. […]
The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) is storing its research and development project information in a way that is difficult to identify and track, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released Thursday. […]
The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) believes that the agency violated the Federal Records Act when it destroyed an employee’s notes that document a security report of EPA’s cloud service provider. […]
Two men were found guilty on Wednesday of charges related to an international cyber fraud scheme. […]
At the quarterly meeting of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board, researchers said that NIST was working on a new effort to emphasize secure software development on its Cybersecurity Framework. […]
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is testing the use of blockchain technology to track unaccompanied minors when they enter Federal custody, said an HHS official on Thursday. […]
The U.S. Marshals Service (USMS) is looking for the best ways to improve its employee’s work-life by improving mobile computing and to do that, they’re focusing more on thinking outside the box. […]
Microsoft hit the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with a filing last week claiming that the Commission has overstated actual broadband availability in the United States and should do better to address coverage gaps. […]
As the nation moves more and more online, Federal agencies are following suit to move more of their civilian interactions to an online or mobile setting. […]
During a panel on the President’s Management Agenda (PMA) Wednesday, Anil Cheriyan, the head of the General Service Administration’s (GSA) Technology and Transformation Services (TTS), said that GSA plans to add three new agencies to the Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative by the end of the year. […]
The Department of Veteran Affairs’ (VA’s) Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) failure to modify its electronic systems to fully support the Forever GI Bill hampered efforts to implement the law early in the process and continue to the present day, according to a VA Office of the Inspector General (OIG) report released today. […]
Margaret Weichert, acting director of the Office of Personnel Management, said that implementation of the 1.9 percent Federal pay raise included in the budget bill passed in February has been held up by legal concerns, but is in its final stages. […]
The National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) proposed FY2020 budget features $492 million for artificial intelligence (AI) and $106 million for quantum information science (QIS) research and development (R&S) funding, despite the White House’s proposed cuts to overall NSF R&D. […]
The question of the best way for transitioning to cloud infrastructures is a big one for Federal agencies. One approach to solve this issue is a slow, measured migration. Another approach is a more dramatic transformation in a shorter period that might be painful, but allows agencies to reap the benefits of cloud migration much sooner. The best approach for agencies to successfully transition depends on the agency itself, its mission, and what officials are looking to achieve. […]
To improve cybersecurity in the U.S., a whole of government approach isn’t enough – the nation needs a “whole of society” approach to cybersecurity, said Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen during a speech hosted by Auburn University. […]
The Department of Energy (DoE) and Intel announced today that they will team up to deliver the first supercomputer with a performance of one exaFLOP–“to a ‘quintillion’ floating point computations per second”–in the United States. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs has made progress in meeting Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) requirements, but still needs to work on most of the recommendations from previous years, a new FISMA audit released last week found. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) last week issued recommendations on how the Department of Defense (DoD) can better go about implementing the position of Chief Management Officer (CMO) – a position that took ten years to fill with a confirmed appointment after it was approved by Congress in 2008. […]
The Department of the Interior received 18 security-related recommendations in a KPMG Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) audit, which identified several information security risks across the agency. […]
Amid discussions of data governance at an IBM Think Gov panel yesterday, Department of Homeland Security Data Manager Col. John Scott explained an interagency predictive analytics program in development between the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veteran Affairs (VA). […]
The government has been trying to apply artificial intelligence to combat the opioid crisis, with projects like real-time mapping of the signs of illegal drug use, and prescription monitoring programs to identify high rates of opioid prescriptions and incidents of “doctor shopping” for the drugs. […]
The Department of Labor (DOL) on March 13 announced creation of a Chief Data Officer (CDO) position in accordance with the OPEN Government Data Act, which includes directing the heads of each Federal agency to “designate a nonpolitical appointee employee in the agency as the CDO of the agency.” […]
Officials from various Federal agencies are focusing on data-driven approaches, utilizing blockchain, and business-focused functions to brace for a digital future. […]