Two House panels investigating the Equifax Inc. data breach are zeroing in on “technical and process” failures that led to the loss of personally identifiable information, including Social Security numbers, belonging to more than 145 million Americans, according to recently released documents. […]

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke frankly about the need IT modernization in the State Department last week, both referencing his personal experiences with the department’s servers and tying it into a larger need for reorganization in the department, but failing to lay out any concrete plan for the changes. […]

For enterprise IT teams seeking ways to deliver on-premises IT services with the speed and operational efficiency of public cloud services, the General Services Administration (GSA) announced the availability of the Nutanix’s Hyperconverged Cloud Infrastructure (HCI) platform to agencies. […]

Pandemic threats such as Ebola, Zika, and avian flu are not only a danger to public health, but are also viewed as potential national security threats, as the National Intelligence Council, an arm of the Director of National Intelligence, points out in its 2017 report, Global Trends: Paradox of Progress. […]

For military analysts struggling to make proper use of millions of hours of full-motion video from drones, the cavalry will begin arriving this month, in the form of computer vision algorithms developed under the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Project Maven. […]

The Army and Navy recently announced that their Cyber Mission Teams were fully operational, and the U.S. Cyber Command now has all of their planned complement of 133 teams in business. With its people (totaling more than 6,000 service members and civilians) in place, U.S. cyber forces can now look to machines to help carry out effective operations in the cyber domain. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) is cooking up big plans for blockchain technology, the digital ledger best known for its support of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. The technology’s decentralized, encrypted approach holds promise for a variety of secure functions in addition to financial transactions, from cyber defense and distributed communications to protecting the digital supply chains used by deployed forces for 3D printing. A Navy officer on the Naval Innovation Advisory Council has written that blockchain could “revolutionize” the way military operations over the next decade. […]

How far can we push the limits of computing power? That is a question that scientists at the National Institute of Technology and Standards (NIST) are pondering. […]

Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) re:Invent conference achieved the impossible dream: 700 public sector technology professionals awake at 7 a.m. in Las Vegas. At the public sector keynote, Teresa Carlson, VP worldwide public sector AWS, highlighted the new AWS Secret Region. The Secret Region was designed for the U.S. intelligence community (IC) and can operate workloads up to the Secret U.S. security classification level. […]

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is piloting a new telehealth program that uses tablets and the cloud to help veterans recover faster than before. The new program is specifically targeting non-healing wounds, which costs the U.S. $50 billion per year in healthcare expenses.  […]

A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology, backed by the Defense Department’s research arm, is developing tool that will give cybersecurity investigators that kind of look at a cyber intrusion, quickly providing layers of detail not currently available, in what researchers say is the first instance of automated forensics. […]

As Feds get smarter about Artificial Intelligence on the cyber frontier, seems agencies’ IT defenders are suffering from schizophrenia about cyber cyborgs. That’s the topline takeaway from the new MeriTalk “Federal Cyber AI IQ Test” study. […]

The FBI currently has a backlog of nearly 7,000 crime-connected phones that its experts are unable to crack. And it’s going to get much worse, law enforcement leaders say. […]

In a bipartisan effort, Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs is looking to protect elections from cyberattacks and propaganda. The Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook, released today, gives campaign officials simple, actionable information to better secure campaign information from adversaries attempting to use cyberattacks. […]

DOD’s Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) recently awarded C3 IoT a multiyear contract to develop an AI-based data management platform for predictive maintenance on aircraft systems and components, beginning with the Air Force’s E-3 Sentry (AWACS) plane and the F-16 fighter. […]

As Federal agencies struggle to meet Office of Management and Budget’s data center optimization targets, the General Services Administration has stepped up its efforts to support agencies as they work to consolidate, migrate and close data centers. […]

Congress wants the Defense Department (DoD) to elaborate on its growing interest is blockchain technology, the secure digital ledger system that can be applied not only to protect financial transactions, but also many other operations such as defending against cyberattacks, protecting logistics supply chains, and securing communications with aircraft and satellites. […]

On Thursday, the Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act, championed by Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, was approved in both the House and Senate. Meaning, significant overhaul and modernization of government technology is just one presidential signature away from being reality. […]

With $5 billion in global revenue, Symantec is the 500 pound yellow gorilla in the cybersecurity business. Some dimensions on the beast: installed at every Federal cabinet-level agency; supports 350,000 customers; tracks 700,000 hackers; and leverages more than nine trillion elements of security data. Now, that’s a big monkey. […]

In honor of National Veterans and Military Families Month, the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetery Administration (NCA) is recommitting itself to its mission to “memorialize veterans in perpetuity.” The NCA is turning to crowdsourcing to revamp its outdated Nationwide Gravesite Locator, a web portal that allows users to access burial information for cemeteries across the […]

The FDIC is not accurately disclosing agency expenditures and spending information in compliance with the Digital Accountability and Transparency Act of 2014 (DATA Act), according to a recent audit issued by the FDIC Office of Inspector General (OIG). […]

The Department of Health and Human Services is looking for ways to combat stovepiped systems by using shared services across the agency for data management. “For us, data is front and center,” said Ed Simcox, deputy chief technology officer at HHS. […]

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives is in the process of moving to a 100 percent cloud-enabled agency. “It’s a bit of a journey at the moment,” Walter Bigelow, chief of the IT systems management division in the Office of Science and Technology at ATF, said at MeriTalk and NetApp’s Cloud Connect. “We will see some solid benefits out of making this move.” […]

The innovations of the Internet of Things can only improve health care in rural America once there is complete broadband access and adoption. “The benefits of telehealth are not available to patients without access to high-speed Internet across America. As technology and health care services expand to meet patients where they live, broadband coverage must improve to make this care accessible,” Michael Adcock, executive director of the Telehealth Center University of Mississippi Medical Center, told the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. […]

In the event of a cyberattack, it’s important for information about the attack to be shared with the public in order to prevent further problems. Jeanette Manfra, assistant secretary for the Office of Cybersecurity and Communications at the Department of Homeland Security, said that the agency shares timely, accurate information with its partners and constituents so that they can take proper action to protect themselves. […]

The May Cybersecurity Executive Order and the White House’s IT Modernization Report have encouraged agencies to look for ways to use shared services to improve cybersecurity. The Department of Justice has been looking into using shared services before the push from the White House, giving the agency a head start at shared services centered on cybersecurity for the enterprise. […]

Agency IT leaders said that Application Programming Interfaces have been essential in modernizing their legacy systems. Param Soni, deputy administrator and deputy director at the Department of Labor, said, “The goal is to always use existing services.” […]

Government agencies are trying to move beyond simply managing data to analyzing and using data to inform decisions. “We have a lot of information and that information needs to be tied together,” said Michael Peckham, Data Act Project Management Office executive director for Health and Human Services, at Software AG’s Innovation Tour on Nov. 2. […]

The Justice Department has evidence to charge six Russian government officials for involvement in the hack of the Democratic National Committee. U.S. authorities are considering charging the Russian officials to make it difficult for them to travel, but they are unlikely to be arrested and prosecuted in the U.S. […]

Tanium, along with its partner World Wide Technology, received a potential five-year, $750 million contract from the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), the Defense Department’s Silicon Valley outfit, to provide managed cybersecurity services to Federal agencies. […]