The Commerce Department plans to form a new office that will monitor supply chain vulnerabilities and work with companies to strengthen the cybersecurity of essential products, FCW reported Friday.

"The office is intended to help us deal with the challenges that we're seeing in our supply chains," Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told House lawmakers at a hearing Thursday.

She said the department is paying more attention to cybersecurity following the SolarWinds hack that affected federal systems.

Raimondo noted in her written testimony to the House Appropriations Committee's commerce, justice, science and related agencies subcommittee that President Biden requested for an $11.4 billion Commerce budget in fiscal 2022, up 27 percent from current agency funding levels.

The discretionary spending proposal includes $150 million to expand the department's Manufacturing Innovation Institutes Program and another $125 million to fund the Manufacturing Expansion Partnership at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

If you're interested in cybersecurity, check out GovCon Wire's Defense Cybersecurity Forum coming up this Wednesday. Click here to learn more.

The FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the U.K. government’s national cybersecurity center have issued a joint advisory to outline additional cyber tactics, techniques and procedures used by Russian foreign intelligence service actors to compromise networks. 

Russia’s SVR actors often zero in on target administrator mailboxes to gain further network access and information and use an open-source command and control framework called Sliver, the agencies said Friday.

“The use of the Sliver framework was likely an attempt to ensure access to a number of the existing WellMess and WellMail victims was maintained following the exposure of those capabilities,” the notice reads.

The agencies recommended mitigation strategies to help safeguard networks against nation-state actors, including applying security updates, implementing good network security controls and managing user privileges and ensuring sufficient logging on-premises and in the cloud to detect compromised accounts.

The advisory also suggested the use of Microsoft’s mailbox auditing action – MailItemsAccessed – to enable administrators to investigate and identify compromised email accounts.

The document came nearly a month after CISA, FBI and NSA issued an advisory listing five network vulnerabilities used by SVR actors to infiltrate U.S. and allied government systems.

If you're interested in cybersecurity, check out GovCon Wire's Defense Cybersecurity Forum coming up on May 12. Click here to learn more.

President Biden has issued an executive order that directs the creation of an office within the State Department that will support multilateral and bilateral engagement to help the U.S. advance efforts to address the global climate crisis. 

The secretary of the State Department will select a director for the climate change support office (CCSO), which will support executive departments and agencies in spearheading diplomatic engagement on climate change, the White House said Friday.

CCSO will also ensure the integration of climate change into U.S. decision processes for foreign policymaking and exercise climate leadership in international fora.

The newly created office will also back other efforts that seek to address clean energy, sustainable development, ocean, shipping, migration and the Artic.

Air National Guard partnered with entities from other sectors to update the MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aircraft system with new features.

Reaper units used by the 174th Attack Wing now have new equipment for updated communications and target identification capabilities, the U.S. Air Force said Thursday.

The new features come with three pods equipable to Reaper: the REAP Pod, the Centerline Avionics Bay Pod and the Freedom pod.

The 174th Operations Support Squadron's assistant director of operations said his team is conducting operational assessments of the new pods.

Demonstrations of the new pods commenced on Monday and will run through May 14 under U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's Northern Edge exercise in Alaska. The tests focus on the pod-equipped Reaper's integrated performance with different ground-based and airborne assets.

Brian Conrad, acting director of the Federal Risk Authorization Management Program, said FedRAMP wants to apply a threat-scoring methodology to evaluate security controls, Federal News Network reported Thursday.

Conrad said FedRAMP is working to implement the fifth control catalog revision of the National Institute of Standards and Technology's Special Publication 800-53.

“We’re ensuring that the controls that are in the baselines are value add, that they are helping with the protect, detect and response [cyber activities] in keeping federal information secure,” he said.

The acting director said his team is applying a threat-based scoring system to evaluate security controls in line with the publication.

Conrad stated that he hopes the threat-based control assessment would help cloud providers and agencies determine which controls must be prioritized in terms of security.

Fluor Corporation (NYSE: FLR) announced financial results for its first quarter ended March 31, 2021. Revenue for the quarter was $2.9 billion and the net loss from continuing operations was $61 million, or $0.43 per diluted share. Earnings attributable to Fluor were negatively impacted by $68 million as a result of NuScale expenses and other adjustments (outlined in the table at the end of this release). Excluding these items, adjusted earnings per diluted share were $0.07. Consolidated segment profit for the quarter, which includes NuScale expenses, was $60 million compared to $55 million in the first quarter of 2020.

"Results for the quarter were consistent with our expectations as we start to work past the effects of COVID-19 on our projects and operations," said David Constable, chief executive officer of Fluor. "We continue to have productive conversations with our clients and believe that prospects and opportunities will begin to pick up as we enter the back half of 2021."

First quarter new awards were $3.7 billion, and ending consolidated backlog was $23.8 billion, up from $23.1 billion last quarter. Fluor’s cash and marketable securities at the end of the quarter were $2.0 billion. Corporate general and administrative (G&A) expenses in the first quarter were $66 million, compared with $34 million a year ago, due to higher stock price-driven compensation.

Outlook