By Dennis Thankachan
Feb 02, 2021
COVID-19 changed the face of the government workplace in 2020, with more employees and contractors working remotely than ever before. The “work from anywhere, anytime” trend, vastly accelerated by the pandemic and innovative, cloud-based digital workforce tools, offers unprecedented flexibility and benefits for agencies and workers alike.
The question for IT and network managers is how to best support this and other vital, modern business and communication tools now and in the future. Legacy methodologies and technologies simply cannot keep up. A solution is unified communications systems. UC provides a flexible, cloud-based platform that allows the workforce to effectively and seamlessly communicate and collaborate regardless of their location and the devices they use.
By GCN Staff
Feb 02, 2021
During a widespread emergency, many responder agencies are unable to exchange information between their computer-aided dispatch (CAD) systems, stifling situational awareness and introducing operational inefficiencies that can impair coordinated response.
To address this challenge, the Integrated Justice Information Systems (IJIS) Institute will develop interoperability standards for CAD systems used by the nation’s public safety agencies. The CAD2CAD project funded by the Department of Homeland Security’s Science & Technology Directorate (S&T) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) aims create a resilient, efficient and interoperable public safety ecosystem that supports multidiscipline response to regional, multistate or national events.
By Peter Elkind, Jack Gillum, ProPublica
Feb 02, 2021
This article was first posted on ProPublica.
As America struggles to assess the damage from the devastating SolarWinds cyberattack discovered in December, ProPublica has learned of a promising defense that could shore up the vulnerability the hackers exploited: a system the federal government funded but has never required its vendors to use.
The massive breach, which U.S. intelligence agencies say was “likely Russian in origin,” penetrated the computer systems of critical federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Treasury Department, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Justice, as well as a number of Fortune 500 corporations. The hackers remained undetected, free to forage, for months.
By Stephanie Kanowitz
Feb 02, 2021
Before the pandemic hit last year, there were no city employees in Berkeley, Calif., who teleworked. Almost overnight, about 700 needed to find ways to connect from home to city systems.
The key to enabling that was an infrastructure modernization project that had recently wrapped up, said Berkeley’s IT Director Savita Chaudhary. Berkeley replaced an eight-year-old system with Nutanix’s hyperconverged platform.
“We needed to have a strong infrastructure in place because our infrastructure was pretty old,” Chaudhary said. The new system is scalable and easy to stand up, so “our application deployment time was reduced significantly,” she said.
By Justin Katz
Feb 02, 2021
Einstein is the Department of Homeland Security’s intrusion detection system. It observes traffic flowing in and out of federal networks, allowing the government to target threats identified by a database of known malware. That makes it unlikely Einstein ever could have detected the malware implanted into SolarWinds Orion because it was delivered to agency networks through a trusted update.
However, overhauling Einstein to identify unknown or zero-day threats would be far too costly, cybersecurity analysts said. The most viable path forward, they argued, would be to install new capabilities, necessarily bolstered by private industry.
Kiersten Todt, formerly executive director of the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity, was blunt about Einstein s record. There are no real strong success stories of Einstein, she said. When you look at what happened with SolarWinds, they essentially outsmarted Einstein.