Over the past year Karen Wrege, CIO, Department of State’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls, (DDTC) led a major “cloud first” IT modernization effort to improve efficiency and security for DDTC employees and external customers. […]
The State Department now has its first permanent CIO in more than a year. Stuart McGuigan was announced on Tuesday as the new CIO and head of the agency’s Bureau of Information Resource Management. […]
The Cyber Diplomacy Act, H.R. 739, was scored by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Wednesday and the CBO found it would not have a material impact on government spending. […]
The House Foreign Affairs Committee marked up the Cyber Diplomacy Act yesterday, signaling the overall approval of the legislation by the committee. […]
The State Department is in the planning phase to create a cyber bureau within the department, a State Department official noted during a panel Q&A session on Thursday. […]
On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the United States would not be able to partner or share information with countries that adopt Huawei technology. […]
Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Dan Sullivan, R-Ark., reintroduced legislation on Tuesday that would “establish an international information sharing program on election administration and security at the State Department.” The Global Electoral Exchange Act, which had been introduced in the last Congress, would enable the United States to work with its international allies to strengthen election security by sharing best practices on audits, disinformation campaigns, and voter database protections–among other pertinent issues. […]
The chairman and ranking member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs have introduced H.R. 739, the Cyber Diplomacy Act of 2019, which would establish an Ambassador for Cyberspace in the State Department. […]
By a vote of 377-3, the House passed the Hack Your State Department Act late Tuesday evening. […]
The State Department is looking to secure its mobile devices and protect against malicious apps–with an app. The department released a request for information on Dec. 20, asking vendors for information about an endpoint protection platform for mobile devices. Responses are due by Jan. 18. […]
The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) said on Wednesday it took a series of actions against Russian operatives for election interference and other malicious cyber activities. […]
The State Department is looking to purchase phone hacking tools for Ghanaian police to help them investigate international crime. […]
The State Department is standing up a cloud program office and taking the opportunity to modernize both systems across the department, according to Brian Merrick, deputy director of cloud program management at the State Department. […]
Following the fifth EU-U.S. Cyber Dialogue last month in Brussels, the United States and the European Union today released a statement reaffirming their “strong partnership in favour of a global, open, stable and secure cyberspace where the rule of law fully applies, where the same rights that individuals have offline are protected online, and where the security, economic growth, prosperity, and integrity of free and democratic societies is promoted and preserved.” […]
The State Department confirmed that its unclassified email system was breached, putting some employees’ personally identifiable information at risk. […]
A bipartisan group of senators wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Tuesday questioning the State Department on what they called its failure to meet Federal cybersecurity standards, including a “near total absence of multifactor authentication (MFA).” […]
The State Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) has issued a new report that flags security control issues for a data analytics test network and internal case management system operated by the Bureau of Consular Affairs’ Office of Fraud Prevention Programs (OFPP), and reported that OFPP is taking steps to resolve the problem. […]
The State Department has issued a request for information for systems that collect relevant online information to “analyze and track global developments in (near) real-time.” […]
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
CGI Federal has won a task order worth an estimated $530 million to provide services under the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) Program to CDM’s Group C Federal agencies, a CGI spokesperson confirmed today. […]
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
The State Department on Friday held the fourth United States-Republic of Korea Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Policy Forum in Seoul, South Korea, which brought together private sector representatives and delegations from the two nations to discuss how the countries can collaborate to advance mutual goals in areas of 5G mobile technology, artificial intelligence, inclusive Internet governance, and data privacy. […]
Welcome to MeriTalk News Briefs, where we bring you all the day’s action that didn’t quite make the headlines. No need to shout about ‘em, but we do feel that they merit talk. […]
The digital transformation in government IT is driving modernization but also expanding the attack surface Federal agencies have to protect. The traditional perimeter no longer exists. Today, there is no “inside” or “outside” the network when it comes to detecting, defending, and deterring cyber attacks. […]
The State Department on Thursday announced its vision for U.S. cyberspace policy based on articulated deterrents to criminal cyberattacks, protection of an open Internet, and international engagement and collaboration to achieve those goals, according to the summaries of two reports to President Trump authorized by the Cyber Executive Order (EO) of May 2017. […]
It’s probably not a shocking revelation to learn that Federal IT managers are less than happy with their agency’s IT infrastructure. Their biggest gripes, according to a recent MeriTalk survey are that it’s 1) expensive, 2) difficult to manage, and 3) inefficient. Small wonder then that the same survey found that nearly all of those who participated—92 percent of 150 Federal IT managers—were frustrated with the state of their infrastructure. […]
A new report from the Departments of Commerce (DoC) and Homeland Security (DHS) suggests that the proliferation of botnets and the automated, distributed cyber attacks they generate will cause greater problems for Federal agencies absent a robust government response to the problem that includes a proper mix of funding, policies, and public-private collaboration. […]
Federal agencies might not meet the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) data center closure goals, according to a new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report. Based on current projections, only 7,221 of the 12,062 data centers that agencies reported in August 2017 will be closed by September of this year. […]
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson spoke frankly about the need IT modernization in the State Department last week, both referencing his personal experiences with the department’s servers and tying it into a larger need for reorganization in the department, but failing to lay out any concrete plan for the changes. […]