Senior Federal IT experts – including the current and former Federal CISO and the Pentagon’s top IT official – are expressing broad agreement that the necessary ingredients are at hand to begin implementing zero trust security concepts for government networks, and that the time to act is now. […]

In the afterglow of last week’s FITARA Scorecard 7.0 report from the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee–which catalogued both substantial improvements by some Federal agencies in numerous grading categories and efforts by others to shore up a sturdier floor under otherwise fairly poor grades–several Federal IT industry executives took a few minutes with MeriTalk to share their thoughts about how agencies might be able to boost their grades on the next scorecard, scheduled for May 2019. […]

Former U.S. Chief Information Security Officer Greg Touhill today called on Congress and the Trump administration to work together to take “bold action” to advance Federal government IT modernization, arguing that investments in modernization would pay off with a host of benefits including better IT security. […]

Grant Schneider, currently the acting Federal chief information security officer, has been named Federal CISO on a permanent basis, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) announced on Thursday. As CISO, Schneider is tasked with implementing cybersecurity practices across the executive branch, as well as serving as a policy advisor for the Trump administration. […]

Federal IT leaders are shifting focus from trying to secure every system to prioritizing the systems that need the most security controls. “We realized that no matter how much we protected our systems, something could happen,” said Thresa Lang, deputy director of the Navy Cybersecurity Division, at CISQ’s Cyber Resilience Summit on Oct. 19. […]

The CIO Council is hosting a governmentwide cybersecurity hiring event Nov. 6-7. The Federal government is seeking information technology and cybersecurity professionals to fill hundreds of positions needed to modernize legacy IT and strengthen the cybersecurity of Federal networks and critical infrastructure. […]

The Federal government is working on improving its inter-agency information sharing process during cyber threats, but Greg Touhill, former Federal CISO, said that information sharing is useless if recipients of the information don’t act on it. “You can share all day long but if people aren’t listening and they aren’t acting on it, bad things are going to happen,” Touhill, president of Cyxtera Federal Group, said at the AFCEA Homeland Security Conference on Sept. 12. […]