The Defense Department is working with the General Services Administration to work out reciprocity between the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification program and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program.
Feb 12, 2021
When the sheriff of Oldsmar, Fla., held a press conference to discuss a Feb. 5 hack into the water treatment facility that could have poisoned the city’s water supply, many cybersecurity experts stood up and took notice.
The intruder seemed to have breached the plant’s industrial controls via a remote desktop monitoring application and may have taken advantage other cybersecurity weaknesses, such as lax password security and use of an unsupported operating system. That access was used to change chemical controls to dump lye into the city’s drinking water.
On Feb. 11, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the FBI, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center issued a joint advisory outlining how cyber criminals can gain unauthorized access to systems by exploiting desktop-sharing software and end-of-life operating systems, particularly Windows 7, and making recommendations for defending water an
By Mike Shrader
Feb 12, 2021
The pandemic forced government agencies to adapt rapidly. During the past 12 months, government IT teams have been busy enabling remote work, implementing cloud migration and digital transformation projects and securing an ever-expanding perimeter. Yet while 2020 ushered in significant change from a federal IT perspective, it’s merely the beginning.
Mega-trends like elastic cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and the internet of things were converging with dramatic effect before the pandemic accelerated adoption. The forced mass shift to remote work simply sped up a transformation that was already underway, making many new technologies non-negotiable. As a result, the shifts that started in 2020 will snowball in 2021 and beyond. Here are five tech trends that all federal IT pros should have on their radar.
By Jason Bevis
Feb 11, 2021
Over the past year, state and local government authorities have rightfully devoted their energies and their budgets to fighting the coronavirus and providing services to those impacted. It’s been a difficult fight, full of challenges, and it’s not over yet.
It seems doubly cruel that in the midst of the pandemic, governments have been forced to deal with cyberattacks that have interfered with their ability to deliver essential services to their constituents. Following a virus attack in September 2020, for example, police officers in Key West, Fla., were forced to use pen and paper for their reports until servers could be rebuilt and IT systems restored.