A group of House lawmakers that has been studying Defense Department (DoD) supply chain concerns has given the Pentagon a list of high-level recommendations to address supply chain risks going forward. […]
The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has named 18 firms it will work with on NCCoE’s Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture Project. […]
The House Government Operations Subcommittee has scheduled a public hearing for July 28 at 2:00 p.m. EST for the release of the 12th edition of its FITARA Scorecard which rates major Federal agencies across a range of IT-related topics. […]
Federal Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Chris DeRusha today offered an expansive set of ideas for how Congress may undertake reform of the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) of 2014 to bring the existing law up to speed with the fast-moving security improvement work underway throughout the Federal government following the release of President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order in May. […]
Recent hacks on localities’ water supply have shown the importance of cybersecurity in the water infrastructure. Witnesses sounded the alarm about water infrastructure cybersecurity and called for training and funding investments at a July 21 Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing. […]
Federal CISO Chris DeRusha said today that the ongoing solicitation of Federal agency bids for money from the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) is drawing a lot of interest in security-related projects – one of the four primary areas that the TMF Board identified earlier this year as ones it would prioritize as it works to deploy up to $1 billion of new funding capacity from the American Rescue Plan Act. […]
The FedRAMP Authorization Act sponsored by Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., has been nearly four years in the making without crossing the goal line. But after the House approved the bill earlier this year, Rep. Connolly said today that the House is “working in lockstep” with Senate colleagues to hopefully pass the bill in 2021. […]
Creating a winning Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) proposal includes thoughtfully crafting a business case, and detailing how the proposal aligns with the agency’s mission, said Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat on July 15 at IBM’s Think Gov Digital 2021 event. […]
Federal agency chief information security officers (CISOs) talked about several aspects of the Biden administration’s cybersecurity executive order (EO) during a July 15 FedInsider webinar in which they flagged steps agencies should be taking to meet the order’s requirements. […]
Senate-approved legislation that would boost Federal funding for U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing and provide the National Science Foundation (NSF) with another $52 billion over five years for research initiatives received strong endorsements from private sector witnesses at a July 15 Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee hearing. […]
The Senate Budget Committee’s agreement reached late July 13 on a $3.5 trillion “soft” infrastructure funding package will help pave the way for Congress to consider the $1.2 trillion bipartisan compromise infrastructure agreement reached last month between the White House and a group of ten senators from both parties. […]
President Biden said today he was “optimistic” after speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin about the United States government’s expectations for cooperation from Russia in the event of ransomware attacks that emanate from Russian territory. […]
With President Biden’s cyber executive order (EO) guiding Federal agencies towards implementing zero trust architectures, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has already created a Zero Trust Playbook to help outline the change and create guidelines, the Corps’ CIO said today. […]
Republican members of Congress have written separate letters to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai expressing concerns about the companies’ collection of data on students, among other issues. […]
U.S. Air Force Chief Software Officer (CSO) Nicolas Chaillan this week emphasized the importance of a moving toward zero trust security architectures within the Department of Defense (DoD) – a process that DoD Acting CIO John Sherman has said is a top tech priority for the Pentagon. […]
With the expected release of the next FITARA Scorecard now just weeks away, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) official with deep knowledge of the scorecard-making process talked about the success that the exercise has had in boosting the roles of chief information officers at Federal agencies, and adjusting along with changing Federal IT priorities. […]
Defense Department Acting CIO John Sherman emphasized the Pentagon’s firm intent to move further toward adopting cloud infrastructures and zero trust security concepts at a June 29 hearing held by the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Cyber, Innovative Technologies, and Information Systems. […]
With President Biden’s Cybersecurity Executive Order adding urgency to requirements for Federal agencies to improve cybersecurity by further implementing core tenets of the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program, a new survey from MeriTalk and Elastic finds that the continued rollout of the next generation of CDM dashboard technology will go a long way toward addressing agency security gaps. […]
President Biden on June 26 pledged his support for a separate voting track in Congress for legislation containing a $1.2 trillion compromise infrastructure agreement that the White House reached last week with a bipartisan group of senators. […]
An infrastructure deal reached today by the White House and a bipartisan group of senators features a potentially huge Federal funding bump for cybersecurity as part of a larger “resiliency” section of the agreement, although details of the scope of the cybersecurity portion remain murky until further information about the plan becomes public. […]
The House Appropriations Committee is proposing to fund the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) with $50 million of new money for Fiscal Year 2022, down sharply from the $500 million proposed by the Biden administration in its budget request issued late last month. […]
Federal chief technology officers (CTOs) are working hard on a number of big-picture policy fronts including improving cybersecurity, modernizing technology, adopting cloud computing, and improving the customer experience. […]
The board of the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) has been reviewing in recent days proposals from Federal agencies to help fund their efforts to move toward zero trust security architectures, according to Matt Hartman, who is Deputy Executive Assistant Director for Cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and also a member of the TMF board. […]
With the focus turning to securing critical infrastructure and a backdrop of an increased number of cyberattacks, a survey of the cybersecurity in the water and waste management sector shows a number of facilities with incomplete cybersecurity programs, the Water Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC) found in an April 2021 study. […]
The cybersecurity executive order (EO) signed by President Joe Biden is requiring Federal agencies to make plans for implementing zero trust architectures to strengthen cybersecurity postures and the directive is being largely seen as a positive by agency experts. […]
The road to Federal agencies implementing zero trust security architecture – one of the overriding goals of President Biden’s cybersecurity executive order – leads unavoidably through completion of the transition to a network infrastructure that relies on all-IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) address protocols, Federal IT officials emphasized today. […]
The Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program that aims to improve Federal civilian network defenses is seeing an “extremely busy” 2021 following high-profile cyber breaches targeting government and private-sector networks, and government moves to open up the funding spigot to the program, a senior CDM program official said during MeriTalk’s June 10 “CDM: More Critical Than Ever” webinar. […]
After a Senate committee hearing yesterday, Colonial Pipeline’s president and CEO was back in front of Congress today, appearing before the House Committee on Homeland Security for a hearing about last month’s ransomware attack. There he expressed a need from private industry for the Federal government to pressure the hosts of these ransomware actors. […]
Even before the coronavirus pandemic jolted Federal agencies into a crash course on network modernization, the Federal CIO Council had cooked up its prescient “Networks of the Future” white paper that lays out next-generation network technologies and strategies that provide a roadmap for agencies in the post-pandemic era. […]
Cross-agency collaboration – which has been important to the larger Federal IT mission for years, and became even more so during coronavirus pandemic – is due for further acceleration as the next mechanism in how government works together, Federal officials said on June 7. […]