The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is implementing technologies that would allow veterans to virtually receive therapeutic treatment. VA intends to do this through the use of extended reality, which covers virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies altogether.

The agency will launch a pilot program to evaluate the usability of VR technology in a variety of therapeutic applications, such as neurological risk assessments and chronic pain management, said Anne Lord Bailey, who chairs the Veterans Health Administration's XR Network.

The XR Network, which launched last fall, has distributed XR technology across 50 sites for use in therapeutic treatment. Bailey said the pilot program's activities would take place at 11 VA medical centers, including sites in Virginia, Texas and California.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology (DHS S&T) Directorate will host an event in September to assess commercially made facial recognition technologies, Federal News Network reported Friday.

DHS’s Biotechnology Rally will assess how these technologies from different companies perform in different environments and challenging scenarios. The event will take place at the Maryland Test Facility, where companies will exhibit their facial recognition systems.

Approximately 600 individuals have volunteered to help DHS test these products. DHS plans to share the event’s results with federal stakeholders and foreign security partners.

“We’re looking at trying to optimize the entire system, the entire process, to reduce errors and help people expeditiously get through the screening process,” said Arun Vemury, the director of S&T’s Biometric and Identity Technology Center.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) could further test air launch and recovery of multiple unmanned aerial vehicles with an industry team led by Leidos' Dynetics subsidiary in October or Nov., Military.com reported Friday.

Lt. Gen. Brian Robinson, deputy commander of Air Mobility Command, hinted at the next demonstration for DARPA's Gremlins program during a Defense News-hosted event and he said the effort is an example of how a military asset like cargo aircraft can be used for a different mission.

Dynetics bested three other participants to win a contract in 2018 to help DARPA build and fly drones for the third phase of the program.

The Gremlins team conducted its third test flight of X-61A UAVs with the manned C-130 transport aircraft in late 2020 to demonstrate system safety and aerial docking operations.

Kratos Defense & Security Solutions performs fabrication, assembly, integration and testing work on the air vehicle as a key member of Dynetics' team.

Military.com quoted Steve Fendley, president of Kratos' unmanned systems division, as saying the government is looking to add mission requirements to the drone swarming concept.

The Department of Defense rolled out its electronic health record system to 25 additional military installations in 12 states as part of the Wave Carson Plus deployment effort, Federal News Network reported Friday. DOD’s deployment of the Cerner-built MHS Genesis EHR system is about 33 percent complete with 42,000 active users.

“This was really a good experience for us to learn how to navigate those geographic challenges because it was the broadest geographic range we had done to date,” said Holly Joers, acting program executive officer for defense healthcare management systems.

“Coming out of that deployment, we’re able to look at how we can leverage virtual support as much as practical. We’re also using our ‘pay it forward’ campaign to get folks who actually use the system today to go forward to the new sites, so they can lend help to their peers to understand the nuances of using the system,” Joers added.

DOD will next field the EHR system at all military treatment facilities in Hawaii and expects those rollouts to conclude by the end of September. Joers said the department has begun preparation work for those deployment waves.

The Pentagon plans to conduct eight implementation waves in 2022 to install MHS Genesis at military health facilities at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland Air Force Base, Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas; Fort Bragg in North Carolina; Eglin Air Force Base in Florida; Fort Gordon in Georgia; and Navy facilities in Jacksonville, Florida.

“We’re going out next week to kick off the Eglin Air Force Base and Jacksonville waves, and we start this process about 18 months out with a kickoff discussion with the commanders,” Joers said.

“While we may discover things that we can learn along the way, the process itself is standardized. We know what to expect; we know how to convey to the commander what to expect as part of the deployment and adoption. Those are the things that give us confidence that we can handle the stacked waves,” she added.

Military and civilian security researchers discovered 238 vulnerabilities within a range of two applications during the third iteration of the Hack the Army challenge of the Defense Digital Service (DDS) and the U.S. Army.

Of those vulnerabilities, 102 were designated critical threats that require immediate remediation, HackerOne said Thursday. The Army and DDS awarded over $150,000 in bug bounties to civilian hackers during the six-week Hack the Army 3.0 challenge that started in Jan. 2021. 

Maya Kuang, Army product manager at DDS, told HackerOne in an interview that the rise in identified vulnerabilities during the challenge could be looked at as an increase in the testing surface and could be attributed to two factors.

“One factor is that the hacker community is pushing the boundaries of what we know in cybersecurity on every engagement and do not hesitate to test out different processes. The other factor on our side when we work with internal partners is the increased understanding of the vetted, crowdsourced testing model and the receptiveness toward it,” Kuang said.

Johann Wallace, compliance division chief at Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM), cited the advantages of conducting Hack the Army to the service branch.

“Hack the Army does a tremendous job of exposing content and coding errors that our normal compliance-based scanning had overlooked. Just because a system is patched doesn’t mean that it’s secure, and an engagement like Hack the Army allows us to leverage additional subject-matter expertise to look at more assets faster than we do with our internal vulnerability assessment teams alone,” Wallace said.

If you want to know more about the latest updates about the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, then check out Potomac Officers Club’s CMMC Forum coming up on June 16th. 

CMMC Accreditation Body Chairman Karlton Johnson will serve as the keynote speaker for the Forum to provide his overview and vision of the CMMC Rollout as well as the top priorities for the board and how industry feedback will help to improve the vision behind how the organization develops for the first 100 days.

To register for this virtual forum and view other upcoming events, visit the POC Events page.