In reaction to the large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that made headlines last year, a bipartisan group of senators has introduced legislation establishing minimum security requirements for government-purchased Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
Cyber
September 20, 2017
More and more, U.S. federal agencies are seeing inappropriate Internet access breaches, rouge devices and denial of service attacks. A key reason why: federal agencies are hindered by budget constraints that prevent information technology (IT) improvements. Agencies also have to juggle competing priorities, complex internal environments and poor top-level decision-making when it comes to cyber management, asserts a recent study from Herndon, Virginia-based SolarWinds Worldwide. The company conducted a survey of 200 federal government IT professionals in July to assess their cybersecurity challenges during the past 12 months.
September 20, 2017
Science fiction fans recognize Asimov’s prescient thoughts on robot programming, captured in his three laws of robotics. In Asimov’s sci-fi world, robots were all programmed to protect their humans (the first law), to obey their humans (the second law) and to protect themselves (the third law). These laws laid the foundation for many fantastic, futuristic stories and have long provided actionable concepts for today’s robots, including those we launch over our modern battlefields. As the stories advanced, he later added another law, called the “zeroth” law, which had priority over all the others, “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”
September 20, 2017
A team at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory has created four generalized linear models to predict the number of cyber intrusions a company or government will experience on its network. To design the models, the team used empirical data about successful cyber intrusions committed against a number of different organizations obtained from a cyber defense services provider that defended the organizations’ networks.
September 19, 2017
A survey of thousands of information technology professionals reveals that a majority of organizations have too few security workers and nearly half do not provide adequate resources for security training. According to the “IT Professionals Are a Critically Underutilized Resource for Cybersecurity” study, 51 percent of the respondents said their systems are less able to defend against a cyber attack compared to a year ago.
September 13, 2017
Half of all Americans and 100 percent of the work force had their personal information compromised in the Equifax hack this summer. While critical data, such as what was stolen in the hack, requires better data protection, enhancing its protection is no longer enough. Resiliency has to be a critical capability too.
September 7, 2017
The increasing nature of computing capabilities, the number of technologies that are interconnected to the cyber world, the amount of data generated, and the speed at which data is reported are all reshaping everyday life. To harness this new dynamic, the commercial computer industry has already switched to a more agile way of developing software. More and more, the military is moving to advance the development of cyber-based infrastructure under this changing environment.
September 1, 2017
Facing mounting threats, cyber hunt teams—aka security operations teams—are turning to machine learning technologies to sift through heaps of data and detect malicious activity faster than ever. People excel at making decisions with the right information, and machines excel at analyzing and retrieving actionable intelligence from large amounts of data. This duo is much more dynamic when working together than apart. Consider Tony Stark and his Iron Man suit versus the fictional character HAL 9000 from the Space Odyssey series.
August 31, 2017
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), responsible for space robotics and Earth science, among other planetary things, will lean on cloud-based computer services to keep its data secure but accessible to its scientists.
JPL hopes to save costs in its cyber-related operations under its new Institutional Computing Environment (ICE) services contract with ManTech International Corporation.
Located in Pasadena, California, JPL is a federally funded research and development center managed by the California Institute of Technology (known as Caltech). The NASA laboratory outsources all of its information technology (IT) needs.
August 28, 2017
The U.S. General Services Administration’s latest endeavor to help government agencies increase their buying power offers a portfolio of providers to simplify the way they acquire and implement telecommunications and IT infrastructure services. According to administration officials, the 15-year, $50 billion Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions (EIS) contract, awarded this summer, will help agencies establish a solid foundation to modernize the government’s IT infrastructure, implement advanced cybersecurity solutions and improve service to the public.
August 22, 2017
The U.S. Defense Department is diving in and investing heavily to leverage the benefits provided by the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT) environment.
August 18, 2017
After months of uncertainty, President Donald Trump announced today that he has elevated the U.S. Cyber Command to a unified combatant command. In addition, Cyber Command ultimately may be separated from the National Security Agency (NSA).
“This new unified combatant command will strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our nation’s defense,” Trump said. “The elevation of United States Cyber Command demonstrates our increased resolve against cyberspace threats and will help reassure our allies and partners and deter our adversaries.”
August 18, 2017
The governments of Iran, North Korea, Russia and China are responsible for 90 percent of attacks on U.S. government agencies and private companies, said a leading cybersecurity expert at a recent conference. Most attacks come in the form of spear-phishing or email-related breaches.
August 11, 2017
The menacing threat of cyberwarfare is pulling together international military leaders in an effort to combat global electronic attacks.
Commanders from key military intelligence posts—including allied commanders from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom—will tackle the seemingly unconstrained risks from cyber criminals at an upcoming forum hosted by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The DIA’s Department of Defense Intelligence Information System (DoDIIS) Worldwide Conference will be held August 14-16 in St. Louis.
August 10, 2017
Cybersecurity solutions company Comodo has launched a new research service called Comodemia for university, government and nonprofit educators and researchers. It gives users access to the Comodo Threat Intelligence Laboratory's cybersecurity data repository, one of the largest in the world.
Comodo's threat data comes from millions of endpoints in more than 220 countries. In the first quarter of this year, the lab detected and cataloged more than 25 million malware incidents. By the second quarter, the total grew to 97 million incidents as the company expanded its research program.
August 10, 2017
The network the Army has is not the network it needs to confront the changing face of warfare, says Maj. Gen. (P) Bruce Crawford, USA, who took over as the service’s chief information officer/G-6 nine days ago.
Gen. Crawford told the AFCEA TechNet Augusta audience the service confronts a confluence of strategic circumstances, with several major efforts all coming together at the same time. Those circumstances include the evolution of the threat, global instability that creates greater demand for ground forces, the rapid pace of technology evolution, the speed at which decisions must be made on the battlefield and emerging doctrines.
August 10, 2017
U.S. Army officials who play various roles in modernizing the network say doing so offers multiple benefits, including saving money, improving cybersecurity and offering greater flexibility on behalf of warfighters.
The officials made the comments while serving on a network modernization panel on the final day of the AFCEA TechNet Augusta 2017 conference.
August 8, 2017
The Army’s first doctrine for fighting in the cyberspace and electronic warfare domains already is changing the way the service operates, said Maj. Gen. John B. Morrison Jr., USA, commander, Cyber Center of Excellence and Fort Gordon, told the AFCEA TechNet Augusta audience in Augusta, Georgia.
MG Morrison, @ArmyCyberCoE, Army took the hardest road it could and stood up a #cyber branch with culture and turf wars that come w/it
August 4, 2017
In 2005, NBC News reported that the use of checks to pay bills was declining and that the majority of people writing them were old geezers such as me. That year, the Federal Reserve reported that an estimated 36 billion checks were written, with more than half of those paper checks written by consumers.
I’m a consumer and a baby boomer—an individual born between mid-1946 and mid-1964. Writing a check is something we boomers do. I was taught in 1965 in high school how to write checks, balance a checkbook and keep track of my bank account. It was a classroom activity.
August 2, 2017
REnigma, a program designed to analyze malicious software, has spun off from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory to create startup Deterministic Security LLC. The Oregon-based company was founded to further mature the technology into a commercially available product and work with early adopters, focusing on incident response for government organizations and large enterprises.
