The 14 percent year-over-year budget increase requested by the Biden administration for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) for Fiscal Year 2022 would be devoted to hiring new career personnel across the agency, including increasing staffing that is critical for IT and cybersecurity oversight across the government. […]
Jen Easterly, President Biden’s nominee to become the next director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), delivered a sobering assessment of the rising threats faced by Federal and private sectors networks and pledged at her June 10 confirmation hearing to strengthen the agency’s capabilities to defend and secure networks. […]
Ransomware was a main focus of concern during a committee nomination hearing today for Chris Inglis to be the nation’s first-ever national cyber director. Amidst a rising number of recent attacks, Inglis detailed how he would deal with the threat of ransomware while also explaining how he would approach building the nation’s cyber policy and approach collaboration if confirmed. […]
Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary Denis McDonough said he expects some results from a strategic review of VA’s electronic health records (EHR) system that began in March to be delivered in the next couple of weeks. […]
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said today he expects legislation will be soon filed in Congress to mandate cyber incident reporting to Federal authorities. […]
Federal and state government chief data officers (CDO) discussed agency strategies and best practices for data governance at a FedInsider digital roundtable event on June 9 against the backdrop of Federal Chief Data Officer Council efforts to establish government-wide best practices for the management, use, protection, and generation of data. […]
While many Federal agencies are transitioning at least some employees back to physical offices, the State Department is searching for new software to enable remote work. […]
The Department of State’s Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is looking for a cloud-based platform to deliver foreign service training. […]
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. […]
The FBI is in search of a contractor that will offer technical expertise and personnel to support the agency’s data centers and key sites of IT operations, according to a June 7 request for information (RFI). […]
The Federal Communication Commission (FCC) announced that 2.3 million households have enrolled in the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB) Program in its first three weeks. […]
The Senate voted late on June 8 to approve the much-amended U.S. Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, by a margin of 68-32. […]
FedRAMP and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the release of version 1.0.0 of the Open Security Controls Assessment Language (OSCAL) that aims to help cloud service providers (CSPs) speed the FedRAMP approval process. […]
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) wants to build on its current transformational period, catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic, to accelerate change and position the military to win, and the service branch’s CIO spoke on June 8 about tech strategies that the Air Force and the Defense Department are putting in place to get to that goal. […]
The Accreditation Board (CMMC-AB) for the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) has approved the first Certified Third-Party Assessment Organization (C3PAO) in the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), the CMMC-AB announced today. […]
The Department of Defense (DoD) awarded a $2.5 billion 5-year blanket purchasing agreement to Dell to provide the U.S. Navy with enterprise software licenses, DoD announced June 4. The contract details that the technology company will provide user-based subscription licenses for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure products. […]
The White House today released the first fruits of a February executive order that has Federal agencies looking at ways to improve supply chain security in several key critical infrastructure areas. […]
Colonial Pipeline Company’s president and CEO announced the company is in the midst of an ongoing review of last month’s ransomware attack and relayed the timeline of events that led to the company paying a ransom and its communication with law enforcement in a Congressional hearing today. […]
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is looking to consolidate its digital human resources system into one single system and wants a contractor to help manage and support VA’s Enterprise Human Resources Information Services (EHRIS). […]
Last fall, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) announced a binding operational directive (BOD) requiring the Federal government to develop and publish vulnerability disclosure policies (VDP). CISA announced today it has chosen vendors for its VDP platform. […]
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. […]
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin signed and approved the Department of Defense’s (DoD) Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) strategy document last month, marking an official start to the marathon to implement the data-sharing strategy across the military, the Pentagon said at a June 4 press conference. […]
While legislation from 2018 sought to have the Social Security Administration (SSA) enter into agreements with states to share and match SSA and child welfare data, a Government Accountability Office (GAO) survey has found that some state child welfare agencies are identifing challenges to participating in these data exchanges. […]
To embrace the opportunities of AI, the Department of Defense (DoD) says it needs to “adopt responsible behavior, processes, and outcomes in a manner that reflects the department’s commitment to its ethical principles, including the protection of privacy and civil liberties.” […]
As part of its ongoing breast cancer research efforts, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Cancer Institute (NCI) is partnering with Queen’s University Belfast to help manage NIH’s research data. […]
Digital vaccine credentials can be used to certify that a person has been vaccinated or tested for COVID-19, but those tools come with challenges that can limit the use of the credentials including security and health data privacy concerns, the Federal government’s chief watchdog agency said. […]
Despite legislative requirements, many Federal websites are not accessible for people with disabilities, a report by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) found. The findings present an obstacle for millions of Americans, especially as the pandemic has forced many government services online. […]
The vast majority of IT leaders at the Defense Department (DoD) see an urgent need for the adoption of enterprise cloud services, but an even larger share say their path to enterprise cloud is blocked by continuing migration delays. […]
Nothing looms larger in the policy gunsights of the Biden administration than cybersecurity – both in the Federal and private sectors – and how to improve it. […]
The Biden administration is pushing hard to help fight the rise of ransomware attacks on private industry, and the White House is taking steps on multiple fronts to work with the private sector to combat the issue. […]