The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that information on the efficacy of identity theft insurance coverage is limited in a report yesterday, adding that it is unnecessary to mandate Federal entities to offer certain levels of identity theft services. […]
The Senate Small Business Committee unanimously approved two bills that aim to bolster small business cybersecurity yesterday. […]
Auburn University has been awarded $564,988 total for two research and development projects to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of (very good) dogs who are trained to detect explosives. […]
In the race to exascale computing, it looks like the Department of Energy (DoE) will be the first to reach the pole. In a couple of years, the department plans on opening a supercomputer, known as Aurora, capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second, five times faster than the current champ. But in addition to beating the Chinese and everyone else to the exascale summit, Aurora will be significant for incorporating artificial intelligence into its repertoire, while pursuing a range of scientific and real-world problems. […]
Due to a successful challenge in court, the General Services Administration (GSA) has rescinded all awards on the $15 billion Alliant 2 Small Business governmentwide acquisition contract (GWAC), the agency announced yesterday. […]
The State Department now has its first permanent CIO in more than a year. Stuart McGuigan was announced on Tuesday as the new CIO and head of the agency’s Bureau of Information Resource Management. […]
With numerous past Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) IT modernization efforts falling short and attracting scrutiny, the head of the department told lawmakers that VA is fully embracing the cloud during a Senate Veterans Affairs hearing today. […]
Without a clear governance structure, the implementation of the DATA Act (the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014) has suffered and new guidance might not be reaching agencies, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last week. […]
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. […]