The Federal CIO Council recently released a case study focusing on Technology Business Management (TBM) adoption rates at a single bureau within the Department of Justice (DOJ). The study will be used as part of the council’s commitment to guide agency-wide adoption of TBM. […]
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. […]
President Donald Trump signed the Providing Resources, Officers, and Technology to Eradicate Cyber Threats to (PROTECT) Our Children Act of 2017, which reauthorizes the National Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program through 2022. […]
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. […]
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., told Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Oct. 18 that he has found it impossible to talk to anyone from the Department of Justice about cybersecurity legislation. Whitehouse said during a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee that intelligence officials have told the committee that the election systems could be hacked by foreign actors. Whitehouse is interested in working with different agencies to develop legislation on cybersecurity. […]
The new administration has left little doubt that consolidation is a top priority. The first budget calls for deep cuts across most agencies. If achieved, these reductions are likely to put the squeeze on already stressed IT budgets. The search for creative solutions can and must intensify. The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is pursuing a hybrid cloud model that will simultaneously address optimization, security and budget priorities—blazing a trail for other Federal agencies to follow. […]
The FBI needs access to encrypted files in order to protect the nation against cyber crime, according to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “Encryption is essential,” Rosenstein said “It is a foundational element of data security and authentication. It is central to the growth and flourishing of the digital economy. We in law enforcement have no desire to undermine encryption. But ‘warrant-proof’ encryption poses a serious problem.” […]
The Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency launched a website on Oct. 2 that will house all IG reports. Before Oversight.gov was created, the IGs of each agency posted their reports on their own sites. […]
Justice officials arrested Yu Pingan of Shanghai on Monday for supplying malware that has been connected to the 2015 Office of Personnel Management (OPM) breach in 2015. […]
The Department of Justice announced on July 20 that it was recently able to take down dark website AlphaBay and its administrator. The action was in conjunction with Europol as well as law enforcement authorities in Thailand, the Netherlands, Lithuania, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France. […]
The number of reported Internet crimes and the costs incurred by those crimes are on the rise, according to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s recently released 2016 Internet Threat Report. The “hottest” Internet crimes of 2016 were business email compromise, ransomware, tech support fraud, and extortion. […]
Cloud infrastructure may be the safest place to store an agency’s most sensitive data, department of Justice officials said at an AWS Public Sector Summit. “I’d say it’s a pretty good place to put your crown jewels,” said Karl Mathias, chief information officer for the United States Marshals Service, adding that commercial clouds may end up being safer than an agency’s own data centers. […]
The FBI is more focused on retaining and training existing employees than hiring young people who might be more technologically adept, according to Howard Marshall, deputy assistant director of FBI’s Cyber Division. […]
The U.S. Marshals Service, which operates within the Department of Justice, is facing the same problems as many of its fellow Federal agencies—recruiting new people, training existing employees, and modernizing IT. […]
The fact that state actors are forced to use criminal, mercenary hackers in their cyber espionage and attack campaigns is a silver lining to law enforcement looking to identify and catch the perpetrators, according to Adam Hickey, deputy assistant attorney general for national asset protection at the Department of Justice. […]
Efforts to ensure agencies are sharing counterterrorism intelligence remain uneven and “less effective” than they could be, according to a report from the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General. […]
FBI Director James Comey confirmed in a House Select Committee on Intelligence hearing on Monday that his agency has been conducting an investigation since late July 2016 into Russia’s 2016 election hacking and whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated with that interference. […]
The Department of Justice today released an indictment of four men involved in the 2016 hack of Yahoo email accounts, two of whom were acting in their capacity as Russian FSB officers. […]
The FBI announced the release of its Most Wanted application, which provides citizens with pictures and information about investigations into wanted fugitives, missing persons, crime suspects, deceased victims, and others. […]
In coordination with Europol’s European Cyber Crime Centre, the FBI conducted a series of interviews and arrests Dec. 5-9 aimed at reducing the number of young people acting as Distributed Denial of Service-for-hire hackers. […]
President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination for United States attorney general, Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., could have an impact on government surveillance power because of his full-fledged support of the National Security Agency’s spying authorities. […]
Police departments across the country that received Federal grants for body worn cameras are concerned about sharing information with the agencies responsible for this funding. Some police departments have gone so far to as to say they would not share body camera footage unless Federal agencies compelled them. […]
An effort to block or delay changes to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure failed to pass the Senate floor, causing the changes to the rule to go into effect on Dec. 1. The changes will allow law enforcement to obtain warrants to search computers in an unknown location and to search any device that the hacker has broken into, potentially granting access to multiple privately owned computers with one warrant. […]
The Federal government’s policy on data collection and management could determine whether President-elect Donald Trump will be able to carry out his administration goal of finding and deporting illegal immigrants who’ve been convicted of crimes. […]
In order to educate law enforcement officials on how to deal with digital evidence and cyber-based crimes, the FBI has created the Cyber Investigator Certification Program, a project that, in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University, aims to address the concerns of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) over a lack of affordable cyber training options for officers. […]
The Department of Justice appealed the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in favor of Microsoft that said American service providers are not required to honor warrants seeking data outside the United States. In this case, which was decided in July, the data the DOJ was asking for belonged to a non-U.S. citizen and was stored in a data center in Ireland. […]
Though the Federal government has certainly experienced ransomware attacks, experts speaking at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association Cybersecurity Summit on Tuesday explained that it is not the primary target for ransomware hackers. […]
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said the “Obama administration has failed” in cybersecurity, and laid out his own plan to strengthen U.S. cyber efforts. […]
Certain types of “warrant-proof” encryption could pose significant danger to law enforcement’s ability to investigate and prosecute crimes, according to Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell. […]
Two men from North Carolina were arrested Thursday on charges related to their alleged roles in hacking the computers of several senior government officials and government computer systems, according to the Department of Justice. […]