Katie Arrington, chief information security officer at the office of the assistant secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment and a 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, said the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) framework does not aim to punish companies for failing to anticipate cyber breaches like the SolarWinds hack but to protect them from negligence, Breaking Defense reported Friday.

“SolarWinds wasn’t normal. No one is going to take that against you and take your certification away against a nation-state actor penetrating in a way that has never been done before — absolutely not,” Arrington said at an AFCEA event.

In mid-December, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released an emergency directive directing all federal civilian agencies to mitigate a compromise that threat actors are exploiting in SolarWinds’ Orion Network Management products. The breach was believed to be carried out by hackers from Russia.

CMMC seeks to help companies build a security baseline to compete for contracts with the Department of Defense and incentivize them for meeting expectations.

“If you get hit by something like SolarWinds, which everybody is going through right now, you’re not going to lose it over that. That’s something that the TTP was new. Nobody had planned for that,” said Arrington. “But if you come in, and there’s a cyber incident at your company and it happened because you weren’t deploying your multi-factor authentication, then you do run a risk.”

NASA, at Stennis Space Center, concluded green run tests of four RS-25 engines that would ignite for the Artemis program's first lunar mission.

The space agency said Sunday it test-fired the engines of the Space Launch System on Saturday for the first mission under Artemis, a NASA-led effort to revive crewed space exploration.

SLS would lift an uncrewed Orion spacecraft that would demonstrate flight in the lunar orbit for the Artemis I mission, now targeted for late 2021.

The four RS-25 engines demonstrated ignition, but remained running for only over a minute, as opposed to the targeted eight-minute firing time. NASA is now looking into possible causes of the premature shutdown.

“Although the engines did not fire for the full duration, the team successfully worked through the countdown, ignited the engines, and gained valuable data to inform our path forward," said Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator and 2019 Wash100 Award recipient.

The agency commenced the green run test series in January last year and experienced delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and some natural disasters. The recent hot-fire test built on the previous green run trials and concluded the series.

NASA, moving forward, will further assess the early shutdown's cause, and will base future decisions on examinations of SLS' core stage and RS-25 engines.

Will Roper, the assistant secretary of acquisition, technology and logistics and 2020 Wash100 Award recipient, recently discussed how the U.S. Air Force should leverage data, IT and agility to remain competitive against adversaries across the digital landscape, FedScoop reported on Tuesday.

Roper is responsible for and supervises Air Force research, development and acquisition activities totaling an annual budget in excess of $60 billion for more than 550 acquisition programs. Roper serves as the principal adviser to the secretary and chief of staff of the Air Force for research and development, test, production and modernization efforts within the Air Force.

Roper noted that federal acquisition heads should bring deep technology expertise that extends to modern software development. He added that government officials should continue to leverage software development, cloud, Kubernetes technology and other software development processes to support the Air Force and Space Force.

Moving into 2021, Roper noted that programs such as Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS) and IT as a warfighting system should remain as a top priority. ABMS is the Air Force’s technical contribution to the Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept. The system links all networks to share data across the services. 

Roper noted that IT is an integral part of warfighting. “IT and connectivity may be the most important thing” to sustain, Roper said. Much of the funding of technology competition has been allocated into research and development (R&D) dollars.

To continue to recruit young airmen and to sustain advancing technologies, dollars needed to be allocated to not only developing new technology but also to investments in back-end systems, Roper added. “Buying the lowest-price technically-acceptable solutions, a tech company would never do that,” he said.