Quick Hits
General Services Administration s new integrated System for Award Management website did not go well. A bipartisan bug bounty provision sponsored by Reps.
Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) and three colleagues would sets up a vulnerability disclosure program at the
U.S. Department of State. The measure was included in the, State Department Authorization Act, passed last week in the House of Representatives. At a Senate hearing last week,
Richard Kidd, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment and energy resilience said that the
Defense Department s CIO has a key role to play in making sure that DOD s facility related control systems, are defensible, survivable, and resilient to operate and sustain critical functions in a cyber- contested environment.
By GCN Staff
May 25, 2021
Recent demonstrations have shown that commercial cloud computing can be used to process and securely deliver actionable information from low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites to military ground stations, command centers or direct to warfighters on the battlefield.
As part of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center s Commercially Augmented Space Inter Networked Operations program, Microsoft and Ball Aerospace demonstrated that data and images from distributed constellations of LEO satellites could be quickly processed, analyzed and distributed using Microsoft s Azure cloud and Ball Aerospace‘s imagery exploitation algorithms.
For the demonstrations, simulated infrared data was pushed from Telesat satellites to a Microsoft Azure cloud data center, where it was processed using Ball’s event-driven architecture and then distributed to multiple end points, officials said in a press statement. In the final demonstration showing that satellite data could
Congress placed a big bet in the American Rescue Plan on the ability of the General Services Administration to reimagine federal IT services and security.
By Aly Fathy
May 25, 2021 Within seconds after reaching a city, earthquakes can cause immense destruction: Houses crumble, high-rises turn to rubble, people and animals are buried in the debris.
In the immediate aftermath of such carnage, emergency personnel desperately search for any sign of life in what used to be a home or office. Often, however, they find that they were digging in the wrong pile of rubble, and precious time has passed.
Imagine if rescuers could see through the debris to spot survivors under the rubble, measure their vital signs and even generate images of the victims. This is rapidly becoming possible using see-through-wall radar technology. Early versions of the technology that indicate whether a person is present in a room have been in use for several years, and some can measure vital signs albeit under better conditions than through rubble.
By Stuart McIrvine
May 25, 2021
Whatever normal looked like in March 2020, it sure doesn’t look like that now. Just about everything in our lives has changed, from how we educate our kids to how we work, travel, bank and buy groceries. It has pushed IT departments to create widespread changes in an incredibly short time, and nowhere is this pressure being felt more than in government IT shops.
Yet, even as local, state and federal agencies have heroically changed course to meet the needs of hundreds of millions of Americans who need services, how those agencies maintain data security must also be reimagined. With so much digital transformation taking place, hackers see plenty of opportunity to find and exploit weaknesses and they are bold; the recent breach of cybersecurity monolith SolarWinds shows that they are willing to take on major targets.