Microsoft Corp. said late Monday that its Digital Crimes Unit seized – with the approval of a special master appointed by a federal court – six internet domains created by Strontium, a hacker organization associated with the Russian government. […]

Research firm Gartner has released its 2018 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies report, which found technologies like artificial intelligence platform as a service, blockchain for data security, and quantum computing reaching the peak of inflated expectations, while technologies such as mixed reality, and blockchain were on the downswing of excitement.

Federal agencies are looking to gain actionable intelligence and information from disparate data sources in a secure, scalable, and efficient manner. An emerging technology known as a big data fabric could provide those agencies with a unified platform “that accelerates insights by automating ingestion, curation, discovery, preparation, and integration from data silos,” according to Forrester Research.

A collection of tech-sector trade groups including the Internet Association and Digital Europe is urging leaders from the world’s top 20 economic powers to focus on policies that encourage broadband deployment and adoption, and job skills training for the digital workforce when the G20’s Digital Economy Task Force meets next week in Argentina.

The Department of Homeland Security today released a request for information (RFI) calling on the private sector to provide DHS with information on strategies and tools to augment its cyber supply chain risk management program.

The Defense Department is pushing full speed ahead on modernization efforts, with recent strides made on a $28 billion R&D project, a $10 billion cloud infrastructure proposed contract, efforts to move cyber defense infrastructure to the cloud, along with myriad advanced research and futuristic projects. They’re even working to overhaul their travel planning system. Call it AirDoD, perhaps?

The Secure Elections Act, S. 2593, which is expected to be marked up by the Senate Rules Committee later this month, has been freshly amended to require states to have a cyber response and communication plan in place as a precondition to receiving Federal grants to support election security and election technology modernization.

A new report from The Century Foundation, a progressive think-tank, urges state law enforcement officials to take action on data privacy regulations in the absence of any substantial movement in that direction by the Federal government.

Pamela Wise-Martinez, chief cloud and enterprise data architect at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, discussed the opportunities for Federal agencies to shift from disparate multi-cloud environments to effective use of hybrid cloud – marrying together on-prem, private, and public cloud use.

While members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee today appeared to be generally positive toward the nomination of Lane Genatowski to be the director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the Department of Energy, they also had some sharp questions for the nominee over his stated support for President Trumps’ plan to get rid of the organization.  

The Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) organization announced it has rolled out facial recognition technology at Mineta San José International Airport (SJC).

The Department of Homeland Security on Aug. 13-15 hosted “Tabletop the Vote 2018: DHS’ National Election Cyber Exercise,” which invited vendors and Federal, state and local election officials to participate in election security preparation.

Cybersecurity solutions provider Cylance today announced that it is offering free artificial intelligence-based antivirus software “to support all 2018 U.S. political campaigns” in the wake of pervasive election security concerns across the Federal government.

The Army needs help from academia and the private sector to modernize its workflow, explained Maj. Gen. Garrett Yee, acting deputy CIO for the U.S. Army, during an Avaya webinar today. Yee specifically stressed an interest in industry helping to make the Army’s workflows interoperable and said that “workflows at the installation level must be scalable” to achieve true modernization.

The information security market will grow 8.7 percent, to $124 billion, in 2019, according to a forecast released today by research firm Gartner.

Robert Bohn, cloud computing program manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), said today that NIST is collaborating with IEEE to create standards that would allow for interoperability between different cloud environments that currently do not exchange data freely.

In advance of his appearance before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee scheduled for tomorrow, four House Democrats hammered Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai over statements he made in 2017 that the FCC was a victim of a distributed-denial-of-service (DDOS) attack which impacted its electronic comment filing system during the agency’s net neutrality rulemaking proceeding last year.

Uber has appointed Matt Olsen, formerly general counsel at the National Security Agency, chief trust and security officer.

The White House said President Trump has signed into law the NIST Small Business Cybersecurity Act, S. 770, which directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to provide resources to small businesses to help them implement NIST’s voluntary cybersecurity framework.

Fraud attacks from mobile devices and applications have grown in 2018, according to RSA’s Q2 Quarterly Fraud Report.