Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report today that calls for the Department of Defense (DoD) to use a central location to catalog the data it generates from its use of satellites – a move that GAO said could reduce the billions of dollars that DoD spends on satellite development by instead hosting more payloads on commercial satellites. […]

State-sponsored cyberattacks are the new normal in adversarial international activity, whether on large or small scales. […]

The House on Thursday voted 359-54 to approve the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019 (HR 5515) and an accompanying conference report produced earlier this month that irons out differences between House and Senate versions of the bill. […]

Disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) can help Federal agencies better utilize their data to improve processes, public and private sector technology officials said  during a FedInsider webinar on July 25. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The National Security Agency’s (NSA) Office of Inspector General (OIG) has for the first time released its semi-annual report to Congress as an unclassified document, and in the process shed light on IT deficiencies at the agency. The report, released Wednesday and covering the period of October 1, 2017 to March 31, 2018, highlights multiple audits that found numerous issues in the governance of NSA’s IT infrastructure and its subsequent ability to mitigate cybersecurity risk. […]

The Defense Department (DoD) today issued its finalized request for proposals (RFP) for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud contract, formally opening the bidding process for a potential $10 billion enterprise cloud infrastructure. […]

As it looks to get new technologies developed and into the field as quickly as possible, the Department of Defense has been making greater use of Other Transaction Authority (OTA), a quick-strike contracting mechanism that has gone in and out of fashion since the 1950s, but is now seeing a resurgence. […]

The Defense Information Systems Agency’s (DISA) plan to move a key cybersecurity service to the cloud is in keeping with the push toward cloud computing for many of the Department of Defense’s operations, including those involving classified information. The question at the moment is whether the cloud services DISA wants to tap into are secure enough to handle the job. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) on Tuesday released a justification and approval (J&A) document that says DoD is expanding the scope of the contract for its Electronic Health Record (EHR) system known as MHS Genesis. The document says that the contract must be expanded to achieve “a single standard baseline solution” with the new Department of Veterans Affairs EHR and also to incorporate the U.S. Coast Guard into the DoD EHR. […]

Congress, in its conference report for the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2019 released earlier this week, is demanding more transparency from the Pentagon regarding the agency’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. […]

The Department of Defense is taking a more concerted approach to the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) by bringing AI projects under one roof and emphasizing the importance of working with industry and academia. At the same time, DoD is also recognizing that it needs to give ethics a seat at the table. […]

After the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019 cleared a major hurdle late yesterday with the release of a conference report that reconciles differences between House and Senate versions of the bills, techies across the Federal government are finding that IT modernization and innovation amendments for the Pentagon fared well in the legislation. […]

The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for FY 2019 took a big step toward passage with the release of the conference report late yesterday that unifies House and Senate NDAA legislation and places in sharp focus concerns about growing cyber and electronic warfare threats and ways that the United States should address them. […]

A new Defense Department (DoD) Risk Management Framework (RMF) – due to be delivered to agency leaders in roughly seven weeks – will have strong implications for the way the department’s cybersecurity professionals perform their tasks, according to John Bergin, IT and Business System Reform Lead at DoD. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

The Defense Department’s (DoD) Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is looking to transition the Defensive Cyber Operations (DCO) infrastructure of its Acropolis program to the cloud, according to a Sources Sought Announcement posted Monday. […]

Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]

It’s the Monday after a 6-goal barnburner in the World Cup final, a torrential downpour trophy ceremony, and we’ve now entered the era of existential dread for the world’s soccer fans. Reality sets in. It’s four years until the world’s biggest sporting event comes back around. […]

As far as the Department of Defense is concerned, artificial intelligence is a team game, particularly where robots are concerned. […]

The term “information warfare” might call to mind Russian trolls exploiting social media, but there has always been a lot more to it than disinformation campaigns on Twitter, or for that matter the airborne propaganda leaflets or Tokyo Roses of wars gone by. Information warfare, or IW, is a key element of every military operation. It spans cyberspace and the electromagnetic spectrum, involving communications of all kinds such as Global Positioning System readings and satellite operations, as well as economic transactions, every level of surveillance, and old-school radio and TV. […]

Alexander Kott, chief scientist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, said Wednesday at the Defense Systems Summit that creating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) solutions for complex battlefield environments requires different prioritization than commercial solutions, and offered four tips for defense organizations looking to implement. […]

Department of Defense (DoD) Chief Information Officer Dana Deasy said today at the Defense Systems Summit that he has identified four “key strategic areas” that will work to support the National Defense Strategy (NDS). Those four areas – cloud, artificial intelligence, C3 (command, control, and communications), and cybersecurity – are organized not in order of importance, but rather “order of integration,” Deasy said, with each of the priorities flowing from the prior one. […]

Paul Craft, director of operations at the Joint Force Headquarters Department of Defense Information Network (JFHQ-DoDIN), spoke today at the Defense Systems Summit about how his relatively new component of U.S. Cyber Command is now tasked with operating and securing the entirety of DoD’s sprawling IT network infrastructure and has undertaken a complete restructuring of network operations for all of DoD. […]

Dana Deasy, chief information officer at the Department of Defense (DoD), said today at the Defense Systems Summit that he would not commit to an official release date for the finalized request for proposal (RFP) for DoD’s Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. […]

Even as Apple went public yesterday with a new mobile device operating system intended to close security loopholes that law enforcement agencies were using to access locked devices, one digital forensics firm said it found a workaround to bypass the new security features for a cost of about forty bucks. […]

Various arms of the Federal government are grappling with how to best curb critical infrastructure risk despite uncertainty regarding the best path forward and knowledge barriers surrounding the underlying technology. […]

Keeping pace with growing cyber threats is an uphill battle for Federal agencies as network complexity increases and the boundaries of networks extend to systems and devices not always under the control of their IT organizations. […]