Cybersecurity thought leaders, including experts and U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, sat down to discuss the impact of the recent SolarWinds cyberattack and the ripple effect it caused to government and the private sector.
In the wake of a riot and invasion of the U.S. Capitol, a panel of cybersecurity experts sat down to discuss another unprecedented incident facing the nation: the SolarWinds cyberattack that has impacted networks across all levels of government and the private sector.
The Thursday discussion, which was moderated by John Carlin, chair of the Cybersecurity and Technology program at The Aspen Institute, aimed to answer three questions: How did the cybersecurity defenses fail so severely, the long-term risks and what to do now?
To answer these questions, The Aspen Institute turned to Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va.; Kevin Mandia, the CEO of cybersecurity firm FireEye; and Katie Moussouris, the founder and CEO of Luta Security.
Read full story at GovTech…
first published week of: 01/18/2021
Margaret Brisbane, coming up on 16 years with the county, will lead an IT department that has been modernizing, leaning into data-driven policy and bolstering election security for more than 2.7 million residents.
The IT department of Florida’s largest county is under new leadership, with former deputy director Margaret Brisbane taking the helm after CIO Angel Petisco retired last week, the department confirmed today.
Brisbane’s promotion to interim director follows almost 16 years working for Miami-Dade County's IT department, according to her LinkedIn profile. She’s been deputy director since November, and prior to that she was assistant IT director for over 14 years, where she was responsible for the county’s ERP systems and led more than 250 staff members in supporting the applications and systems of the county’s various departments. .
Read full story at Government Technology…
first published week of: 02/08/2021
Mark Forman, the former administrator for e-government and IT at OMB and Gloria Parker, a former CIO at HUD, helped author a new white paper from the Partnership for Public Service to further…
While Congress debates more funding for IT modernization, a group of CIO “gray beards” detail how current agency technology leaders can use existing policies and funding to accelerate modernization and digital transformation.
The Partnership for Public Service’s chief information officers’ SAGE program details how current agency technology leaders can use existing policies and funding to accelerate modernization and digital transformation.
Mark Forman, the former administrator for e-government and IT at OMB, said there are three ways agencies can invest in new technologies without having to ask for or wait for Congressional funding.
“One is focusing on agency priority goals. As the result of the pandemic, everybody working from home, there are certain things that have become barriers to being able to process the work of the government. Things like moving to digital signatures is a common one that I think people hear about. But it’s kind of an anathema to me, because one of the first tasks I had when I came into OMB 19 years ago was to make sure the Paperwork Elimination Act gets implemented. One of the key parameters was allowing for digital signature, a lot of agencies never integrated that in their legacy processes. Then you added security threats, you add in other aspects that you could say would be operation and maintenance (O&M). But really, the technology is such that if you leverage today’s technology that’s much more secure, that you create money for O&M,” Forman said on Ask the CIO.
Read full story at Federal News Network…
first published week of: 02/22/2021
Streamlined buying procedures will help agencies modernize more quickly.
You reach for a pen across your crowded desk and hit your white chocolate mocha instead. It splashes across the keyboard of your laptop, and voila, instant brick. Well, it was on its last legs anyhow, you think, now I can upgrade to the newest model.
Or maybe you’re scrolling through a tech website and spot a new thermostat, the kind that senses how many people are in a room and adjusts the temperature accordingly. Fabulous, you think, no more bickering over how hot it is, and we save money at the same time.
That’s all fine, if it’s your laptop and your home and you’ve got the money to buy the new gadgets right away. Federal workers know all too well how long it takes to get money for new technology projects approved, appropriated and even allocated. By the time the cash is in hand, the requested equipment may already be outdated.
Read full story at FedTech Magazine…
first published week of: 03/01/2021
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) introduced new legislation designed to make presidential records more easily searchable and accessible.>
To kick off Sunshine Week, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) is introducing new legislation designed to update a decades-old presidential records law.
The bill, called the Presidential Records Preservation Act , would require the president, vice president and White House senior officials to “make and preserve” records that track the president’s official activities.
The bill would also require White House officials to establish specific records management controls to capture and preserve electronic records, and to make them easily searchable and accessible.
Read full story at Federal News Network…
first published week of: 05/24/2021
Bill would require firms to disclose when they use software to assess candidates.
In 1964, the Civil Rights Act barred the humans who made hiring decisions from discriminating on the basis of sex or race. Now, software often contributes to those hiring decisions, helping managers screen résumés or interpret video interviews.
That worries some tech experts and civil rights groups, who cite evidence that algorithms can replicate or magnify biases shown by people. In 2018, Reuters reported that Amazon scrapped a tool that filtered résumés based on past hiring patterns because it discriminated against women.
Legislation proposed in the New York City Council seeks to update hiring discrimination rules for the age of algorithms. The bill would require companies to disclose to candidates when they have been assessed with the help of software. Companies that sell such tools would have to perform annual audits to check that their people-sorting tech doesn’t discriminate.
Read full story at Wired…
first published week of: 01/18/2021
Much of the NSA’s most prized intelligence data may be moving to the cloud.
The National Security Agency has awarded a secret cloud computing contract worth up to $10 billion to Amazon Web Services, Nextgov has learned.
The contract is already being challenged. Tech giant Microsoft filed a bid protest on July 21 with the Government Accountability Office two weeks after being notified by the NSA that it had selected AWS for the contract.
The contract’s code name is “WildandStormy,” according to protest filings, and it represents the second multibillion-dollar cloud contract the U.S. intelligence community—made up of 17 agencies, including the NSA—has awarded in the past year.
In November, the CIA awarded its C2E contract, potentially worth tens of billions of dollars, to five companies—AWS, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM—that will compete for specific task orders for certain intelligence needs.
Details on the NSA’s newly awarded cloud contract are sparse, but the acquisition appears to be part of the NSA’s attempt to modernize its primary classified data repository, the Intelligence Community GovCloud.
Read full story at NextGov…
first published week of: 08/16/2021
The 2021 Action Plan focuses on finalizing and building on action items from the original 2020 Action Plan.
The Office of Management and Budget issued a late release of the Federal Data Strategy 2021 Action Plan. With little more than two months left in the year, the list of mandatory action items focuses on building on progress with—or catching up to—the first Action Plan, issued in 2020.
The Federal Data Strategy was finalized in late December 2019 with the release of 20 specific deliverables for individual agencies and governmentwide bodies under the 2020 Action Plan, which included several deadlines under each action item, all due in calendar 2020. Some of those deadlines were pushed out as agencies moved to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting mass teleworking.
For the remainder of this year—and until a 2022 plan is released—agencies should continue to “prioritize foundational activities such as capacity assessments and basic governance and infrastructure building” outlined in the 2020 Action Plan, the strategy states.
Read full story at NextGov…
first published week of: 11/01/2021
The Office of Management and Budget on Thursday provided agencies with key advice on its updated guidance for Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) proposals, as officials said board operations have scaled up due to an influx in submissions following a $1 billion injection in funds and relaxed repayment requirements.
Deputy Federal CIO Maria Roat told stakeholders on Thursday the TMF board was continuing to meet twice a week and had added new members after announcing repayment guidelines earlier this year which allow for partial repayment on projects seeking to improve cybersecurity posture, modernize high-priority systems or address cross-government services and missions.
“The flexibility in repayment has really been a game changer,” Roat said at IBM’s Think Gov Digital 2021 event, noting how projects tasked with improving cyber posture rarely yield tangible savings or cost avoidance.
Read full story at FCW…
first published week of: 07/26/2021
OMB released new guidance to agencies today for how the Technology Modernization Fund board will loan out the windfall funding Congress approved.
f federal chief information officers and program managers want to get their hands on some of the $1 billion in the Technology Modernization Fund, they have less than a month to put their plan together. [editor’s note: This article first appeared May 4, 2021]
The Office of Management and Budget set a deadline of early June for proposals to receive expedited consideration. But the TMF Board will accept proposals on a rolling basis going forward after that early June initial deadline.
Read full story at Federal New Network…
first published week of: 05/10/2021