Current and retired Defense Department IT officials today discussed cost and opportunity implications of further cloud adoption by the military and potential payoffs including acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. […]
Yesterday two academics proposed creating an international organization modeled after the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), that would “provide assistance and relief to vulnerable citizens and enterprises affected by serious cyberattacks.” […]
Data from the Federal government’s IT Dashboard website appear to indicate that Federal CFO Act agencies have made some progress but are still more than 1,000 data centers short of their intended closure goals for 2020 under the Data Center Optimization Initiative (DCOI). […]
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released new draft guidance for the cybersecurity of medical devices on Wednesday, with a focus on risk management and applying the cybersecurity framework from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). […]
For agencies looking to score a touchdown with their customer experience, the General Services Administration (GSA) released its Customer Experience Playbook today, offering “a synthesis of ideas gathered from interviewing several subject matter experts and leaders in CX and Human Centered Design in government.” […]
Two prominent tech-sector trade groups said Tuesday that planned trade agreement talks between the U.S. and the European Union, United Kingdom, and Japan should prioritize easing cross-border data flows and barring requirements to compel the transfer of technology, source code, and encryption keys. […]
In a report released today, the International Information System Security Certification Consortium, (ISC)², a nonprofit association of certified cybersecurity professionals, found a global cybersecurity workforce shortage of 2.93 million people as of August 2018. […]
Federal CIO Suzette Kent provided a demonstration this morning at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s (ACT-IAC) Imagine Nation ELC Conference to help envision a future for government services that may not be that far away. […]
Artificial intelligence (AI) machines can out-think humans when it comes to a lot of complex, fine-grained tasks, such as detecting signs of cancer more accurately than doctors can, or finding exoplanets based on “dimming effect” data from distant solar systems. But what they don’t have is good old common sense, the ability to apply its knowledge, and the experience to various tasks humans can do from childhood. […]
Emily Murphy, administrator of the General Services Administration (GSA), delivered a keynote address today that provided a glimpse of her vision as the head of GSA, along with recent government IT wins and the path she sees ahead for the agency serving as the Federal facilitator for IT acquisition and modernization. […]
At the request of several Federal agencies, the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA) has created and released a framework for organizations to better share indications and warnings (I&W) of cyberattacks and deconstruct that data into indicators that can be monitored. […]
Federal Deputy CIO Margie Graves said today that the forthcoming update to the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) Initiative is coming “extraordinarily soon.” With the update, there seems to be an acknowledgment that the former ways of TIC–now over a decade old–will be yielding, including the TIC architecture often seen as expensive and inflexible to cloud technologies. […]
Christopher Krebs, under secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s National Protection and Programs Directorate (NPPD), said DHS is not seeing an increased number of cyberattacks on election systems, but “a consistent and persistent level of activity” in that arena. […]
Health insurance provider Anthem has agreed to pay the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Civil Rights (OCR) $16 million to settle what HHS called “potential violations” of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in connection with an Anthem data breach in late 2014 and early 2015 in which cyber criminals stole data on nearly 79 million individuals including names, Social Security numbers, medical identification numbers, and email addresses, among others. […]
Following the fifth EU-U.S. Cyber Dialogue last month in Brussels, the United States and the European Union today released a statement reaffirming their “strong partnership in favour of a global, open, stable and secure cyberspace where the rule of law fully applies, where the same rights that individuals have offline are protected online, and where the security, economic growth, prosperity, and integrity of free and democratic societies is promoted and preserved.” […]
As Federal agencies continue to amass vast amounts of data, it’s inevitable that some portion of it won’t hold a ton of value to an agency’s mission. It could be a simple email to schedule your next meeting, or it could be notes scribbled on a Word document and stashed on an agency server. Outside of its immediate use at that point in time, there’s not a strong need to store it in perpetuity. […]
A bipartisan group of three senators–Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Ben Cardin, D-Md.–last week introduced Protect Our Elections Act, which aims “to amend the Help America Vote Act of 2002 to require states to take steps to ensure domestic ownership and control of election service providers.” […]
The Pentagon confirmed on Friday a cyber breach that compromised personal and credit card information of military and civilian personnel. […]
A new report from MeriTalk finds that Federal legacy network infrastructure may be struggling to keep pace with the growing demands of agency cloud migrations, next-generation technology, and the continued push to modernize IT systems. […]
The Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity & Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) released a new alert yesterday highlighting five publicly available tools frequently observed in cyber incidents worldwide. […]
Later this month government and private sector leaders will gather for a frank discussion about redefining government cybersecurity. The conversation could hardly be more timely: the Federal government is facing seemingly endless challenges, from evolving threats and aging legacy systems to budget constraints and workforce gaps. […]
The recent Department of Homeland Security alert describing ongoing cyberattacks on global managed service providers highlights the need for the U.S. government to take a lead role in protecting internet infrastructure, according to some industry cybersecurity experts. […]
Senators Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., asked the chief executive officer of Super Micro Computer in an Oct. 9 letter whether the company has ever found evidence of tampering of components or firmware that targeted the company’s products, among other questions stemming from a Bloomberg Businessweek article reporting that chips made by a Chinese firm and allegedly used by numerous U.S. companies and government agencies were engineered to enable backdoor data transmissions to China. […]
Mike Duffy, acting deputy director for the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Network Resilience Division, said today that many Federal agencies are expecting to have all of their .gov domains protected from email spoofing campaigns, ahead of an October 16 deadline to do so. […]
Three Senate Democrats asked Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Joseph Simons in an Oct. 10 letter to open an investigation into Google’s disclosure earlier this week that it discovered and patched in March a vulnerability in its Google+ social media platform that may have exposed profile data on up to 500,000 accounts, but did not inform users of the vulnerability in a timely way. […]
The Department of Justice (DoJ) announced yesterday that Yanjun Xu, a Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) operative, was extradited to the United States Tuesday on charges of conspiring and attempting to commit economic espionage and steal trade secrets from U.S. aviation and aerospace companies–including GE Aviation. […]
Federal customer experience professionals offered advice this week to agencies looking to improve their customer experience and highlighted resources that their agencies have utilized to improve customer service. […]
The Federal government is seeing progress in seven out of 10 key cybersecurity metrics that are being tracked quarterly as part of the President’s Management Agenda (PMA), Federal CIO Suzette Kent said today. […]
Agriculture Department CIO Gary Washington laid out his agency’s IT modernization journey today, beginning with USDA’s work as the lighthouse agency for the Centers of Excellence (CoE) initiative, and continuing with the agency’s selection as one of the first three to receive an award under the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF). […]
McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) today released a new report about modernizing Social Security Numbers (SSN) in light of growing privacy and security concerns over using SSNs as a de facto personal identifier. The […]