Today’s federal cybersecurity and IT news: The Promoting and Enhancing Cybersecurity and Information Sharing Effectiveness Act of 2011 (The PRECISE Act) passed the House Homeland Security Committee though members had concerns over whether it was sufficient. More here. The Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice discussed information sharing through N-DEx, the FBI’s nationalRead… Read more »
I am at the Chicago Federal Executive Board today where I spoke on “The State of Social Media in Government” (I’ll post my slides later). The other speaker was Special Agent Peter Traven from the FBI who spoke under the title “Cyber Threats for the Federal Community.” Specifically, he focused on the issue of trustRead… Read more »
Authored by Doug Kruger and originally posted to Blue Coat’s Federal Blue Print blog. There has been a lot of conversation around the new cybersecurity legislation and several bills have been circulating in Congress as lawmakers are faced with the growing reality of cyber attacks that should cripple critical infrastructure such as water, electricity orRead… Read more »
The Office of Management and Budget and the Department of the Treasury launched the Do Not Pay site, an online portal to stop payments for individuals or organizations that have defrauded the government or are ineligible to receive government money. More here. The proposed Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) has been attacked byRead… Read more »
[Editor’s note: This post from Michael Tanji of Kyrus-Tech first appeared at the highly respected national security blog Haft of the Spear. Follow Tanji online at http://twitter.com/mtanji -bg] Conventional wisdom is telling us that “assumption of breach” is the new normal. Some well-respected names in computer security would have you believe that the appropriate responseRead… Read more »
Gadi Ben-Yehuda Collaborative Consumption. The Sharing Economy has come to government, at least in the form of car sharing. Alex Howard has a great article that not only details two cities’ experiences in car sharing (Boston and DC), but has some great links to other resources on the general topic of collaborative consumption. A DifferentRead… Read more »
This month, the Department of Energy, in working with the White House, Department of Homeland Security, and power companies, will test a voluntary reporting model to discover cybersecurity gaps in electricity delivery systems. More here. A researcher at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory has developed a cyber sensor to track how networkRead… Read more »
600,000+ Mac Computers Infected While this kind of activity wouldn’t rouse much attention from those esconced in WinTel (Windows and Intel) architechures, it is much less common for Mac users to be impacted by infections on this scale so quickly. The infection, called Flashback, is installed via a Java vulnerability (CVE 2012-0507) which was patchedRead… Read more »
I attended the cloud conference keynote by Ryan Berg, a Senior Architect for Security Research at IBM. The presentation, titled “Cloud Security – A Business Transformation Nirvana or Security Nightmare?” examined the move towards the cloud and the associated implications and opportunities for security. Berg began his presentation by looking at the environment in whichRead… Read more »
Hacking the hacktivist: The inside scoop on how Anonymous works by GovLoop Insights 2011 may very well be the year of Anonymous — the hactivist group took down the Justice Department website, Stratfor, mastercard, defense contractor Vanguard and even the Vatican. Their reach is impressive…and even more so when you consider how Anonymous runs. TheRead… Read more »