The desire to make the employees of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) more efficient in their work led to the creation of a Robotics Process Automation Center of Excellence, explained Pam Dempsey, the center’s lead. […]

electric grid

In a report released Feb. 25, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said that “most” of nine agencies tasked with protecting the 16 critical infrastructure sectors “have not developed methods to determine the level and type of adoption of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.” […]

Health and Human Services HHS

Leaders from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) shared how the agency’s acquisition process fueled successful IT transformation in projects like Accelerate at the Feb. 26 ServiceNow Federal Forum. […]

A group of graduate researchers from the University of California-Berkeley trained a machine learning model to predict voter preferences using only readily available personal information, suggesting further-reaching implications on the use of AI to infer voter behavior and potentially influence elections. […]

military healthcare, veterans healthcare

The Offices of Inspectors General (OIG) for the Departments of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Affairs (VA) are planning to begin a joint audit to determine what actions taken by the DoD and VA in acquiring and implementing a common, commercial electronic health record system. […]

A senior official speaking Feb. 26 at the RSA Conference clarified recent steps by the State Department to publicly attribute and condemn acts of cyber aggression on the part of Russia, calling the actions of the Department part of a deliberate attempt to establish a framework for appropriate nation-state behavior in cyberspace. […]

Cybersecurity

Federal officials from the Defense Department (DoD), Justice Department (DoJ), and the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) on Feb. 25 totaled up the sobering costs of intellectual property theft from U.S. interests in recent years, and pointed to strategies their agencies are pursuing to put a dent into that total going forward. […]

cybersecurity

Three members of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC) on Feb. 25 hinted at several themes of the group’s upcoming recommendations for U.S. cybersecurity doctrine and policy that is due for public release on March 11. Central to the report’s conclusions will be a rethinking of cyber deterrence strategies, and greater coordination between the Federal government’s several agencies that focus on cyber defense, they indicated. […]

NIST
Cybersecurity
election security

Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs pledged today that there is no issue drawing more focus and attention at the Federal government level than election security leading up to the 2020 elections later this year. […]

Modernization, Army, cybersecurity, technology
US tech

The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) found that the Cybersecurity Vulnerability Identification and Notification Act of 2020 (H.R. 5680) could slightly lower the deficit, but not by a significant amount. The bill, introduced by Rep. Jim Langevin, D-R.I. on Jan. 27, would authorize the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue administrative subpoenas in rare […]

cyber workforce

There is a concerning lack of cyber confidence and organizational maturity across all levels of government, according to a survey released today by SolarWinds. The report, which surveyed IT operations and security decisionmakers from Federal, state, and local governments, found that the biggest IT pain points for the public sector are IT complexity, insider threats, and controlling user network access. […]

Pentagon Military Defense DoD

The Department of Defense (DoD) officially adopted the Defense Innovation Board’s (DIB) ethical artificial intelligence (AI) principles Feb. 24. […]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is ripe to revolutionize the workforce and the process of human-machine teaming, but funding, organizational application, and experimentation must accelerate in order for it to become a reality, posited Steve Harris, senior vice president and general manager of Dell Technologies Federal. […]

Sean Plankey, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Cybersecurity, Energy, Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) at the Department of Energy (DoE), today outlined solutions to cybersecurity skills gaps in the industrial controls sector as security for that sector continues to change from older “manual-mode” methods to more modern technologies. […]

Since 2014, the beginning of CIO Joseph Klimavicz’s tenure, the Department of Justice (DoJ) has achieved $600 million in IT cost avoidance, reduced cyber risk by 70 percent, and streamlined its 23 email systems into one cloud-based solution. […]

Ron Wyden Oregon

In a letter to ShiftState Security Chief Security Officer Andre McGregor, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., challenged the results of an audit ShiftState was supposed to have conducted of the Voatz voting app. […]

Oki Mek, senior adviser to the CIO at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), on Feb. 20 discussed the agency’s current effort to draft a cloud strategy, and the importance of going forward with a unified strategy that guides the entire organization. […]

NIST

A senior General Services Administration (GSA) official said today the agency is supportive of the primary aims of a new report recommending steps to modernize the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), which provides a standardized approach to security assessment, authorization, and continuous monitoring for cloud products and services. […]

The Federal defense agency responsible for secure communications of national leaders and military operations said Social Security numbers and other personal information may have been compromised in a 2019 data breach. […]

The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) phishing prevention training is ineffective and lacks formalized procedures, according to a Feb. 21 report from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG). […]

ServiceNow Federal Forum

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report on deepfakes, a technology which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and can depict someone appearing to say or do something they never did. […]

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