John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security at the Department of Justice (DOJ), said the federal government is still in the process of analyzing the damage brought by a massive cyber breach linked to Russia, NPR reported Thursday. Demers shared his observations on threat actors behind the recent hack.

"A lot still to be analyzed in terms of both the scope and depth of this hack," Demers told NPR in an interview. "But as you know, there's a lot of confidential and sensitive information that is transmitted and stored on unclassified systems, a lot of information that would be of interest to a foreign state who was trying to learn about our intentions and our planning." 

"This looks more like what a nation state would traditionally try to do through human means, through spies, but trying to do it through technical means and cyber intrusions," Demers added. 

DOJ launched a program called China Initiative in an attempt to counter the Asian country’s efforts to steal U.S. government secrets and intellectual property. Demers has led the initiative since its inception.

"We do see some other countries engaging episodically in economic espionage, but none of them on the scale and sophistication and persistence of the Chinese government," he said. “It really is an effort to develop the Chinese economy and Chinese companies under this rubric of rob, replicate and replace.”

The U.S. Army continues to develop future capabilities for the service branch’s tactical network team, which includes featuring new waveform technologies in future deliveries of its tools to reduce adversaries’ chances of interfering with communications and improving their capabilities. 

In addition, the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command’s C5ISR (Command, Control, Communication, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) Center is also exploring capabilities that could allow for more secretive communication. 

The C5ISR Center is also working with two companies on two other millimeter wave technologies to solve mobility and range challenges with commercial offerings. Dan Duvak, chief of the C5ISR Center’s Radio Frequency Communications Division, believes WiGig will allow narrow beams that point in a specific direction to help the Army’s command posts evade detection.

“They’re like laser beams being pointed from your router to each user,” Duvak said. “What we see on the battlespace is taking that commercial technology and pairing it with existing Wi-Fi capabilities at command posts. We can now reduce the detectability because we have these small pencil beam-type signals, going just user to user instead of a big bubble of blasting energy.”

A Federal Robotic Process Automation Community of Practice report states that overall RPA program maturity for fiscal year 2020 increased by 70 percent from FY19 as agencies continue to deploy automation in more functional areas. The report found that RPA deployments also reached 460 in FY20 from 219 in the prior fiscal year.

According to the analysis, federal RPA programs have deployed complementary capabilities for process improvement as agencies are increasingly adopting the CoE model for RPA implementation.

Data from the report shows that while agencies reported a strong demand for RPA, incorporating intelligent automation saw limited success due to issues in security requirements.

FY21 efforts must prioritize the standardization of automation authority approvals that involve standard protocols including the security of controlled unclassified information as well as classified or restricted data, the Federal RPA CoP noted.

Adopting sophisticated technology platforms for RPA programs would additionally ensure long-term program capacity and effectiveness, the report states.

“The CoP pursues a two-fold mission to share best practices and lessons learned, as well as to break down common technology and management hurdles that can slow RPA deployment,” said Gerard Badorrek, chief financial officer of the General Services Administration, in the report’s foreword.

The audit comes as part of the Federal RPA CoP’s efforts to measure the maturity of agencies’ RPA programs in line with Cross-Agency Priority Goal 6 or "Shifting from Low to High Value Work.”

NASA has authorized two heliophysics research missions worth potentially $108.3 million combined to study solar impact and space weather near the Earth’s atmosphere.

The agency said Wednesday the first mission is a $53.3 million geomagnetic research effort known as Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) led by Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and slated for launch in June 2024.

EZIE will utilize cube satellites deployed 60 to 90 miles above Earth to study the behavior of aurora and its impact to the magnetosphere. Aurora tends to interfere with communications and radio signals in addition to damaging spacecraft, according to NASA.

The mission will use the Auroral Electrojet index as well as ultraviolet spectroscopy concepts for measuring solar activity. 

The second $55 million effort, known as Extreme Ultraviolet High-Throughput Spectroscopic Telescope (EUVST) Epsilon Mission, will be led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and is scheduled for 2026. The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory will lead the NASA contribution to the mission.

The EUVST solar telescope will work to observe the release of solar wind as well as the eruption of solar material which impact the space radiation environment. Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA, said he is looking forward to continuing international collaborations with JAXA as well as European partners for EUVST.

“We are very pleased to add these new missions to the growing fleet of satellites that are studying our Sun-Earth system using an amazing array of unprecedented observational tools,” he noted.

Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has received two new supercomputers, named “Jean and Kay,” to address the Department of Defense’s (DoD) most data-intensive computational challenges and drive the continued development of artificial intelligence and machine learning tools. 

The lab anticipates that the new supercomputers will enter production in the “mid-fiscal 2021 timeframe, according to ARL’s announcement notes. These new supercomputers are in addition to the Pentagon’s Supercomputing Resource Center, which is already housed at the ARL. 

“Jean and Kay will allow ARL to support many of DOD’s most significant modernization challenges to include digital engineering and other emerging workloads,” ARL Defense Supercomputing Resource Center, or DSRC Director Matt Goss explained. 

The two systems are named Jean and Kay, as an homage to Jean Jennings Bartik and Kathleen “Kay” McNulty Mauchly, who are considered by DoD to be “computing pioneers as part of the original team of programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.” 

“By adding specialized technology to augment traditional high performance computing with data analytics, these machines will serve as a springboard on which DOD scientists can make game changing discoveries,” Goss added. 

In addition, “Jean and Kay” will also offer a chance for DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) to shift and refresh its capabilities. That program generally offers billions of computer core hours annually to the Pentagon to support research and development, as well as testing of military systems and platforms.