Yesterday, legislation was reintroduced to make it easier for cyber specialists to lend their expertise to other Federal agencies. […]
Deloitte’s Center for Government Insights and the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University on Wednesday released the “Chief Data Officer in Government: A CDO Playbook.” […]
Less than two weeks after the end of the partial Federal government shutdown and with the looming threat of another such disruption coming on Feb. 15, will Federal government IT officials in large numbers be making the trip out west to the U.S.’s preeminent cybersecurity conference next month? […]
Amazon Web Services (AWS) shared its support for calls for a national legislative framework when it comes to regulating facial recognition software in a blog post written today by VP of Global Public Policy Michael Punke. […]
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. […]
Top officials from communications industry trade groups told members of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee today what few, if any, in the hearing room would disagree with: the United States needs to win the global race to leadership in 5G communications services and technologies. […]
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. […]
The Department of Defense Cloud Strategy released this week emphasizes the importance of the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative (JEDI) cloud contract in the computing environment of the Pentagon. […]
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. […]
The Defense Department’s newly published cloud strategy leans heavily on several core concepts including maximizing competition among cloud service providers, sticking to a single cloud strategy, leveraging commercial-sector best practices, creating a culture for better technology evolution, and above all else supporting warfighters and increasing their lethality. […]
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. […]
The Internet Security Alliance (ISA) announced Monday that it hired Dan Lips as its new assistant vice president. […]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has tapped John Brown for a promotion, according to a report from The Hill. […]
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. […]
If recent events are any indication, we could be seeing big changes to agency cloud migration plans in 2019. The Federal government could be rethinking its role in owning and operating its own data centers, strongly questioning whether that is a job best left to government employees. […]
Google urged governments to avoid excessive regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), instead suggesting “international standards and norms” in key areas in a white paper released last week. […]
The Department of Defense and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) today released a draft request for quotations (RFQ) for the $7.8 billion Defense Enterprise Office Solutions (DEOS) contract. The deadline for responses is February 15. […]
Maria Roat, chief information officer at the Small Business Administration, provided a run-down of her office’s extensive to-do list during a keynote address on Thursday at the Veritas Public Sector Vision Day event, and emphasized the importance of laying the proper data-management policy groundwork before embarking on cloud deployments and forays into artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]
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. […]
The chief data officer role has morphed quickly at Federal agencies, as agencies shift their focus from open data to supporting data-driven strategies, said two Federal CDOs during Veritas’ Public Sector Vision Day event on Thursday. […]
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. […]
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. […]
Federal IT leaders discussed challenges within their agencies of overcoming divergent cultural views to data sharing during Veritas’ Public Sector Vision Day on Thursday. […]
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. […]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Tuesday released the Democratic roster for the Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress, which was created as part of a House Rules package adopted earlier this month when Democratic leadership took over in the House. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., has not yet named the committee’s Republican members. […]
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. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs failed to share Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI) guidance across the department, leading to an estimated 860 unreported data centers and inadequate DCOI goals, according to a report released Wednesday by the agency’s inspector general. […]
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. […]