Defense Department

In less than 30 days, the Defense Department will dish out 11 prizes for innovative solutions to real-world challenges facing digital forensics examiners. And it's not too late to join the fight against cyber crime. Submissions for the 2010 Defense Department Cyber Crime Center (DC3) Digital Forensics Challenge will be accepted until November 2.

A different cybersecurity culture needs to be diffused throughout the Defense Department. It will have to view cyberdefenses not as a bandage to be selectively applied to a patchwork of applications. The new cybersecurity must become an inseparable feature of every computer technology that enables our operations.

Defense Department leadership appears to be viewing cyberdefense issues primarily as a matter of policy and strategy that can be fixed incrementally. That is not possible. Cyberdefense deficiencies have became deeply rooted as result of the defective ways in which the Defense Department acquired IT over the past decades. Cyberdefense flaws are inherently enterprise-wide and are mostly not application specific.

On the heels of an announcement from U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates where he proposed eliminating the positions of assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration along with the J-6, the push to make the Defense Department more efficient continues. The INVEST Awards contest will reward the 25 best ideas submitted by department employees with cash prizes.

The U.S. Defense Department's hub for all things social media has undergone a serious facelift, complete with tips, tricks and lessons on how to share information responsibly and effectively.

Paul Strassmann offers his insights on network virtualization as an answer to cyber security concerns about the proliferation of things contributing to the "attack surface," such as networks, circuits and computers.

"The difference there is that we don't want to prioritize and think just in terms of 'how do we secure information' without thinking through our real objective of assuring support for DOD missions."--Mark Orndorff, director of the PEO for Mission Assurance and Network Operations, DISA

The U.S. Defense Department has announced its policy on "Responsible and Effective Use of Internet-Based Capabilities"--in less formal words, its social and new media policy. This is the DOD's first official policy on new media.

President Obama's Open Government Initiative is underway, and the government wants to hear from you. What are your ideas on open government? Help the government draft open government plans by sharing your thoughts on how each agency can be more open and transparent.

"The Defense Department must take decisive remedial steps to achieve positive controls over all social computing transactions originating from the toxic Internet. The risks are too great to accept insufficient safeguards."--Paul A. Strassman, distinguished professor of information science at George Mason University