An international partnership between the Department of Homeland Security's Science and Technology (DHS S&T) Directorate and Israel has awarded a total amount of $1.5 million to homeland security projects that tackle 3D mapping, threat detection and other topics of interest.

The Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation issued awards to Liberty Defense Technologies, Levitection, Ception Technologies and Hivemapper under the Homeland Security or HLS program, DHS said Wednesday.

Georgia-based Liberty Defense Technologies will work with Israel's Levitection to develop a technology that uses artificial intelligence and electromagnetic imaging to surface concealed threats. Jerusalem-based Ception Technologies and California-based Hivemapper will partner to create a 3D mapping system for both air and ground environments.

“The BIRD HLS program gives us the opportunity to bring some of the best U.S. and Israeli technology companies together to address our broad homeland security needs,” said William Bryan, DHS' undersecretary for science and technology.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued an analysis report in response to cyber attacks on cloud services of various organizations. The agency also found that hackers take advantage of email forwarding rules created by users to gain access to sensitive data.

Threat actors used several techniques such as brute force login attempts, phishing and a “pass-the-cookie” attack to bypass multifactor authentication and exploit vulnerabilities in the organizations’ cloud security practices, CISA said in the report published Wednesday.

“These types of attacks frequently occurred when victim organizations’ employees worked remotely and used a mixture of corporate laptops and personal devices to access their respective cloud services. Despite the use of security tools, affected organizations typically had weak cyber hygiene practices that allowed threat actors to conduct successful attacks,” the report reads.

CISA has recommended several measures to help organizations protect cloud environments, such as implementing conditional access policies, reviewing user-created email forwarding alerts and rules and assessing active directory sign-in logs and unified audit logs for malicious activity.

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) testing office said DoD has stopped the rollout of a $2 billion cybersecurity project called the Joint Regional Security Stack (JRSS) to classified networks due to its inability to help defenders safeguard component networks from “operationally realistic cyber attacks,” Bloomberg reported Thursday. 

JRSS is intended to provide DoD with attack prevention, intrusion detection and other network security capabilities.

Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s testing chief, recommended that the department’s chief information officer continue developing alternatives to the security stack and halt the program’s deployment to unclassified networks “until the system demonstrates that it is capable of helping network defenders to detect and respond to operationally realistic cyber attacks.” 

Russell Goemaere, a spokesman for DoD, said the department has not paused the deployment of JRSS to unclassified networks but has postponed the rollout to classified networks to have more time to mature joint procedures and techniques for midpoint security and improve the operational requirements.