Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Dan Sullivan, R-Ark., reintroduced legislation on Tuesday that would “establish an international information sharing program on election administration and security at the State Department.” The Global Electoral Exchange Act, which had been introduced in the last Congress, would enable the United States to work with its international allies to strengthen election security by sharing best practices on audits, disinformation campaigns, and voter database protections–among other pertinent issues. […]

The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) announced that Benjamin Hovland and Donald Palmer were sworn in as commissioners on Wednesday, granting the commission a full quorum for the first time in over a decade. […]

DoD Pentagon Military

The call last week by the Pentagon’s top tester to temporarily halt deployment of the Department of Defense’s Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) wasn’t exactly out of the blue. The DoD’s independent Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E) said the same thing in its annual report last year, while citing some of the same problems, such as staffing shortages, difficulty in integrating disparate commercial technologies, and the lack of mature standard operating processes. […]

Army DoD military Defense AI

In a report released yesterday by the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation (DOT&E), missions and systems remain at risk from adversarial cyber operations with operational testing discovering vulnerabilities that are considered mission critical. […]

Department of Defense (DoD) and private sector leaders gathered to discuss the state of cybersecurity in the U.S. military during a Tuesday Federal Executive Forum webinar. […]

Cyber Security Brainstorm
FBI

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has tapped John Brown for a promotion, according to a report from The Hill. […]

Census 2020 image-min

In a letter on Friday, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., questioned Steven Dillingham, director of the U.S. Census Bureau, over how nearly $5 billion in IT costs are being managed by the Bureau. His concerns come as IT costs grew by $1.56 billion between October 2015 and December 2017. […]

The Bank Policy Institute, a nonpartisan public policy, research, and advocacy group, announced Thursday that it has hired Kenice Middleton to be its new senior vice president of cybersecurity risk management. […]

DoD Pentagon Military

According to an internal evaluation report, the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint Regional Security Stacks (JRSS) program is behind schedule, undermanned, full of cybersecurity issues, and should be discontinued until the system demonstrates that it can assist network defenders in detecting and responding to cyberattacks. […]

email security DMARC

Valimail said in a report issued Friday that use of the Domain Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance protocol (DMARC) is growing in both the public and private sectors, likely helped by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) mandating its adoption across Federal agencies. DMARC is an email authentication protocol that verifies the authenticity of an email’s sender in order to prevent spoofing and phishing. […]

Machine learning AI-min

From a cybersecurity perspective, the strengths of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are also weaknesses. The capacity to crunch massive amounts of data, identify patterns, and learn while working covers a lot of territory, but also leaves room for vulnerabilities, which Pentagon and Intelligence Community (IC) researchers want to close up. And the job doesn’t look easy. […]

employee hired workforce worker-min

Jordan Rae Kelly is now a senior managing director in the cybersecurity practice for FTI Consulting. Kelly was previously the director for cyber incident response at the National Security Council (NSC). […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) has put a lot of emphasis on speeding up the acquisition and development of new technologies out of a need to keep pace with new advances and potential adversaries. But a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO)–evaluating the Army Futures Command modernization effort–throws in a word of caution, saying there is such a thing as going too fast. […]

Facebook

In the face of increased public scrutiny and increased calls for Congressional oversight into the social media giant’s cybersecurity habits, Facebook has made quite a few new cybersecurity hires. […]

.gov website cybersecurity government

A new report from cybersecurity firm Security Scorecard released this week found that the partial Federal government shutdown had minimal negative effects on Federal network security, and even found some positive impacts on patching and endpoint security. […]

The House on Tuesday passed H.R. 769, the Counterterrorism Advisory Board Act of 2019, which would establish a board at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to coordinate and integrate departmental intelligence, activities, and policy related to counterterrorism. […]

Cybersecurity cyber

A Federal data breach disclosure law, which would require companies to report data breaches to customers within 30 days, will be reintroduced this year, according to Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I. […]

government shutdown government closed option-min

During the State of the Net 2019 Conference, cybersecurity experts zeroed in on how the shutdown impacted not only the United States’ cybersecurity posture but also the Federal government’s cybersecurity workforce. […]

Navy seal

The Navy has awarded General Dynamics Information Technology a potential five-year, $155.6 million task order to provide cybersecurity support for the Department of Defense program that is overseeing the F-35 fighter jet. […]

capitol government shutdown government closed-min

With the 116th session of Congress now well underway, committee and subcommittee rosters are being finalized. For those in the Fed IT world, there are a few committee assignments to pay attention to. […]

Cybersecurity flag

In a report released Wednesday, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies called for an operating plan for cyber warfare similar to the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP) the United States had during the Cold War. […]

State Department
Cyber Security Brainstorm
Cyber America Connected Internet of things
DHS Homeland Security

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an emergency order on Tuesday afternoon in an effort to mitigate Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure tampering. DHS and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have been tracking incidents of tampering where multiple executive branch agency domains were impacted. […]

Space NASA Satellites

The Air Force’s National Air and Space Intelligence Center on Wednesday released a report identifying the potential threats that China and Russia’s presence in space has on civil and military space services. […]

ransomware

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein released a report on Thursday that highlights the impact of data breaches on the state in 2018, and paired the report with a bipartisan bill to strengthen breach notifications to include ransomware attacks. […]

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