The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced today that it is launching a new edition of its Hack DHS program – a bug bounty program started in 2019 – to identify potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities within certain DHS systems. […]
The Biden administration’s Cybersecurity Cybersecurity Executive Order issued in May 2021 has put a greater emphasis on cybersecurity at the Federal level – which is especially important after numerous high-profile ransomware and software supply chain attacks came to light earlier in the year – but many Federal cyber leaders say the Cyber EO only addresses a fraction of today’s cybersecurity challenges. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) has awarded artificial intelligence (AI) application software company C3 AI a $500 million contract to deliver products and services for AI-enabled modeling and simulation, C3 AI announced Dec. 9. […]
The United States is partnering with Australia, Denmark, and Norway on an export controls and human rights initiative over the next year to prevent the proliferation of software and other technologies that enable human rights abuses. […]
President Biden released an executive order (EO) today with requirements for 17 different Federal agencies to make customer experience (CX) improvements across 36 areas. The order as a whole broadly focuses on ways Federal government agencies can create more seamless interactions with the public, Federal officials said on a press call explaining the White House directive. […]
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., expressed “serious concerns” regarding wide-scale government telework in a Dec. 8 letter to leadership at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the Office of Personnel Management, and the General Services Administration. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a statement on Dec. 11 with guidance for organizations to protect themselves against the “log4j” critical vulnerability that surfaced over the weekend. […]
President Biden today issued an executive order that broadly supports new efforts by the government to improve the quality of citizen interactions with the government, and requires17 Federal agencies to make customer experience (CX) improvements in 36 areas ranging from accessing retirement benefits to renewing travel passports. […]
While a good bit of the focus on the conferenced version of the fiscal year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization Act has centered around the lack of incident reporting and other legislative items that were cut from the bill, the defense spending bill that passed the House of Representatives last week continues to retain a variety of important cybersecurity and tech-related provisions. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) held its inaugural Cybersecurity Advisory Committee meeting Dec. 10, focusing heavily on how CISA and the committee can increase the Federal and national cybersecurity workforce. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) held its first Cybersecurity Advisory Committee meeting today, in which agency officials laid out their expectations for the committee and called for actionable cyber recommendations from committee members that CISA can implement. […]
The Better Cybercrime Metrics Act – legislation that aims to improve cybercrime data collection and give Federal law enforcement more tools to stop online crime – was approved this week by the Senate via unanimous consent, and by the House Judiciary Committee via voice vote. […]
The Office of the National Cyber Director has hired Joe Croce as its senior budget advisor, according to Croce’s LinkedIn. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) data strategy already provides an overarching vision, focus areas, guiding principles, essential capabilities, and goals necessary to transform the DoD into a data-centric enterprise. Yet, according to DoD officials, another very necessary element to making this strategy work is clear communication throughout the entire department. […]
The General Services Administration (GSA) announced it will be pushing back the release of requests for proposals (RFP) for its Polaris Government-Wide Acquisition Contract (GWAC) vehicle until January 2022, the agency announced on its interact GSA blog. […]
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) wrote an open letter to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) opposing any efforts by the agency to expand its use of facial recognition technology. […]
Despite the Department of Defense’s (DoD) efforts to add its Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certificate (CMMC) program to its acquisition process beginning in 2021 and up until full implementation in fiscal year (FY) 2026, a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that DoD has not met its implementation goals, nor properly communicated key decisions with industry. […]
After a spate of cyberattacks and ransomware attacks on American companies and critical infrastructure providers since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, lawmakers and members of the cybersecurity industry expressed shock and disappointment that mandatory cyber incident reporting was dropped from the conferenced version of the fiscal year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). […]
The Senate Judiciary Committee favorably reported the Open Courts Act of 2021 (S. 2614) to the full Senate floor with bipartisan support for the legislation. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) has announced establishment of a Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO), responsible for strengthening and integrating data, AI, and digital solutions across DoD. […]
Two major pieces of cybersecurity legislation – a Senate-approved bill to reform the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA), and another bill to standardize reporting requirements for major cybersecurity incidents – both failed to make the cut in the House-Senate conference version of the fiscal year (FY) 2022 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that passed the House Dec. 7. […]
The Department of the Navy has a good sense of how data is generated on the mission side, but struggles to analyze that data and decide appropriate uses for it, according to the Navy’s Chief Data Officer (CDO) Tom Sasala. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is contracting JumpStart, an app developer, to build a platform using AI and a user’s own body to improve the physical therapy process – unless other off-the-shelf apps are identified with equal or greater capabilities. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has issued a presolicitation on SAM.gov, detailing its plans to utilize emerging technologies to improve healthcare products and in turn, patient care. […]
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a second cloud computing region specifically intended to host top-secret classified information from U.S. defense, intelligence, and national security agencies. […]
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is acknowledging strides that the Biden administration has taken this year to broadly improve cybersecurity, but is still encouraging the Federal government to take more steps to strengthen the cybersecurity of the nation’s critical infrastructure in light of several high-profile cyber incidents over the course of the past year. […]
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is looking for small businesses to work on a bid for a potential 10-year, $8 billion professional services contract to support satellite programs. […]
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) released the third installment of the Security Guidance for 5G Cloud Infrastructures four-part series, which is intended to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of data within a 5G core cloud infrastructure. […]
Federal mandates, including Cloud Smart and the Biden administration’s cybersecurity executive order, are pushing agencies to modernize and migrate to the cloud. But with modernization comes complexity. Agencies are increasingly living in a hybrid world, with some workloads remaining on-premises while others move to the cloud. Add multi-cloud vendors to the mix, and it becomes harder for agencies to have a holistic view across their environments. […]
Since the release of the Cloud First mandate in 2011, the Federal government has been pushing agencies to modernize legacy technology and migrate to the cloud. While Cloud First evolved into Cloud Smart, agencies have historically taken a measured approach to cloud migration. On the most recent FITARA scorecard, only three agencies scored an A in the Modernizing Government Technology category. Eleven agencies scored a C or below. […]