Category Archives: federal cybersecurity

Cybersecurity takes a quiet role in DHS secretary’s loose outline of priorities

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Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly laid out the new administration’s priorities for his department Tuesday, listing cybersecurity alongside defending the nation’s borders and stopping terrorist attacks — but providing far fewer details about the online defensive mission than about the other two. “We live in an interconnected world,” Kelly told a packed theater at the George Washington University in his first major policy address since taking office in January. “That’s not a trend, that’s reality. We rely on technology for everything from programming our coffee makers to running global corporations. This reliance, perhaps over-reliance, brings risks … These digital threats are no less significant than threats in the physical world,” he said. In a section of prepared remarks he did not deliver, apparently due to time constraints, he ridiculed “the plodding pace of bureaucracy,” and the government’s arthritic procurement system, comparing it to “sending troops to take Fallujah armed with muskets […]

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NSA cyber-defense chief: ‘I have never been more busy’

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The man responsible for leading the National Security Agency’s defensive mission says his team is fielding more calls than ever from agencies across the government. Dangerous, highly capable hackers and a desire by agencies to adopt cloud technology have increased the workload for Information Assurance chief Paul Pitelli and his office, which he says is “sort of like the Geek Squad for defense” in government. Pitelli is a career professional who has served in the NSA for more than 20 years as the secretive spy agency transformed into what it is today — a highly sophisticated technology behemoth with an array of federal responsibilities, including both signals intelligence and protecting sensitive government systems. With the recent retirement of former Information Assurance Directorate head Curtis Dukes, a renown computer scientist and intelligence community icon, Pitelli took on an increased role in an ever important effort to ensure that the Defense Department and broader government […]

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McAfee pushes government to craft improved cybersecurity game plans

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In the face of malware’s growth in both category and character, government experts joined private sector leaders Thursday to formulate better ways to tackle cybersecurity challenges. During McAfee’s 2017 Security Through Innovation Summit, both sides of the public and private sector relationship talked about changes needed at every aspect of the security ecosystem, from better information sharing to more automation to a total revamp of the government acquisition process. “We as an industry have been tackling this cybersecurity problem in the fundamentally wrong way,” said Brian Dye, McAfee’s executive vice president of products, at the event hosted by CyberScoop and FedScoop. Automation was a continuing theme Thursday, promoted not only as a way to address cybersecurity workforce shortages but also improve the consistency and reliability of network defenses. A panel of government speakers drew a distinction between tasks that could be made “automatic” — where no input was required — and […]

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Legacy IT makes federal agencies less secure, study says

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Federal agencies that shift money from maintaining outdated legacy IT systems to modernizing them can expect to see fewer cybersecurity incidents — as can the agencies that migrate legacy systems to the cloud or implement strict data governance policies, according to a new academic study. On average, for each 1 percent of its spending that an agency shifts from maintaining legacy systems to buying new ones, it can expect a 5 percent reduction in the number of security incidents, found the authors of the study “Security Breaches in the U.S. Federal Government.” It was written by two academics from the Fox Business School at Temple University and the Red McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and published last week by the Social Science Research Network. The study also found that federal agencies that migrate their legacy IT systems to the cloud suffer fewer security incidents of improper access. And […]

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Bossert promises funding, centralization for federal cybersecurity

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President Donald Trump’s budget outline, slated for release Thursday, will propose significant increases in funding for federal cybersecurity, White House homeland security adviser Thomas Bossert said Wednesday. “President Trump intends to put his money where his mouth is,” Bossert said in his his first major policy speech. “Cybersecurity will be funded through DHS and the Department of Defense,” he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies in a keynote address at its Cyber Disrupt 2017 event. Privately, he told a small group prior to his remarks that there would be a “significant plus up” for cyber programs in both DHS and the Pentagon, one of the organizers told CyberScoop. Bossert also promised that the Obama administration’s push to modernize and centralize federal computer networks will continue under Trump. “Federal networks at this point can no longer sustain themselves. We cannot tolerate indefensible technology, outdated antiquated hardware and software,” Bossert said. “Modernization […]

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Federal cyber-incidents were down in 2016 — at least on paper

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This article first appeared on FedScoop. Federal agencies in 2016 experienced less than half the number of cyber-incidents they did in 2015, according to new Government Accountability Office data — but there’s a catch. The drop-off from 77,183 agency cyber-incidents reported to the Department of Homeland Security’s U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team in fiscal 2015 […]

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