The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) will increase the authority CIOs have over direct hiring decisions, according to a post on Federal Register. […]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Cyber Guardian program, which provides cyber-attack victim notification services, is operating with “incomplete and unreliable” data, and as a result the FBI is unable to determine whether all such victims are being notified, according to a report released April 1 by the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General. […]
The House Veterans’ Affairs Subcommittee on Technology Modernization held its first hearing of the year today with hopes of getting a baseline reading from the Department of Veterans Affairs’ Office of Information and Technology (VA OIT) – but with no OIT representation, the committee went ahead and discussed the department’s challenges with panelists from VA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO). […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) announced today that it has modernized the Highly Adaptive Cybersecurity Services (HACS) Special Item Number (SIN) to include additional cybersecurity services. […]
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has announced winners for Part 1 of its Career Compass Challenge, with five white papers selected to win a $5,000 award each. […]
With the U.S. decennial census set to begin gathering data in one year, the focus on new technology involved in the effort is increasing, along with security questions. The coming census has a reference date of April 1, 2020. […]
The Department of Energy (DoE) could do more to improve its identification of legacy information technology (IT) infrastructure and develop and implement plans to modernize IT systems and components, according to a March 27 DoE Office of Inspector General (OIG) audit. […]
Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, Representative Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., sent a letter to Acting Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Peter Gaynor last week to address the sensitive personal data of hurricane and wildfire survivors that was mistakenly shared with contractors. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking to small business for help in its $16 billion move to a new electronic health record (EHR) system, as the department announced its intention to host business engagements on the topic last week. […]
South Korean authorities extradited to the United States on Thursday a Ukrainian man who allegedly engaged in a fraud campaign and laundered at least $2.8 million with the help of overseas cybercriminals. […]
The Veterans Affairs (VA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) found that allegations of an Office of Information Security Office of Information and Technology (OIT) employee steering two contract awards to a company were unsubstantiated in a report Friday. […]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is switching up its strategy for acquiring IT services, extending its current blanket purchase agreement for another year and reworking its strategy for a new $5 billion IT services contract. […]
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced Wednesday that Office Depot agreed to pay $25 million to settle allegations that the company “tricked customers into buying millions of dollars’ worth of computer repair and technical services by deceptively claiming their software had found malware symptoms on the customers’ computers.” Support.com, Office Depots’ software supplier, agreed to pay $10 million to settle the same allegations. […]
Reps. John Katko, R-N.Y., Dan Lipinski, D-Ill., Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., and Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Penn., introduced a bill yesterday to create a 35-person advisory committee within the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency so that cyber professionals across different industries can help make suggestions on cybersecurity policies and programs. The National Technology Security Coalition, […]
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. […]