Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing today that the Federal government’s focus going forward should be to “prevent and deter” interference with U.S. elections like that perpetrated by the Russian government in 2016, and to “harden” election infrastructure against future interference from Russia and other malicious parties. […]

Sens. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., today introduced legislation that would create a Federal Acquisition Security Council to oversee creation of a government-wide strategy to address supply IT chain security and mitigate supply chain security threats from IT equipment and service purchases. […]

White House

The Senate this afternoon convened to discuss H.R. 5515, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 (NDAA), which is headed for a vote later tonight and is expected to be approved. […]

With new threats emerging to and from the data economy, a zero trust IT security approach can solve some of the problems that come with digital transformation, said Jeff Pollard, principal analyst at IT sector research firm Forrester at the Akamai Government Forum on June 14. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report Thursday that found many Federal agencies are not entirely up to speed in classifying members of their cybersecurity workforce, although many of them have traveled well down the road toward compliance. […]

Dr. Tom Leighton, chief executive officer of cloud service provider Akamai, said Thursday that data center defense on its own is woefully inadequate to handle capacity available at the edge of the network to launch distributed attacks. […]

Akamai today released an Attack Spotlight recounting how it mitigated the largest distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack in its history. Earlier this year, an Akamai client, an unnamed software company, was the target of a massive DDoS attack–one that broke the 1 terabyte per second threshold for the first time. […]

Federal agencies are facing a tall order in cleaning up their cybersecurity practices in the wake of some tough love dished out by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in a risk assessment and action plan released May 30. Agencies need to streamline processes, better share information, and finds ways of getting a better return on their cyber investments, all of which can be harder than it sounds. […]

Federal agencies and private sector firms are easing into intelligent automation (IA) technologies by first using those technologies to tackle repetitive processes and then moving closer to artificial intelligence (AI) applications, government and private sector officials said last week. […]

Witnesses from the Federal government, academia, and the private sector zeroed in on cyber threats facing the U.S. electric grid at a House Energy subcommittee hearing Thursday afternoon. During the hearing–which largely centered around research and innovations in electric grid and energy technology–all of the witnesses stressed the importance of shoring up the U.S. electric […]

House members on Thursday reintroduced a bipartisan bill that would prevent states from requiring technology companies to include encryption “backdoors” in their products that would allow governments to access data stored on those products. […]

The House Homeland Security Committee today approved H.R. 5733, the DHS [Department of Homeland Security] Industrial Control Systems Capabilities Enhancement Act of 2018, that would amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to give DHS’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) the responsibility to maintain capabilities to identify threats to industrial control systems (ICS). […]

Tony Scott was the Federal government’s third chief information officer, serving the nation in that role from 2015 through early 2017. During his time at the helm of government-wide IT, Scott led the development of 2016’s State of Federal IT Report, which left a lasting roadmap for modernization progress in the Federal government. […]

The digital transformation in government IT is driving modernization but also expanding the attack surface Federal agencies have to protect. The traditional perimeter no longer exists. Today, there is no “inside” or “outside” the network when it comes to detecting, defending, and deterring cyber attacks. […]

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