The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is directing federal agencies and contractors to report cybersecurity vulnerabilities in systems and technologies to prevent potential exploitation by adversaries.

CISA said Wednesday that agencies must implement a Vulnerability Disclosure Policy (VDP) to ensure the resiliency of the U.S. government’s online services and simplify the public’s reporting of cyber vulnerabilities.

The VDP is based on a “bug bounty” concept of incentivizing public action and covers the federal government's internet-accessible information systems. The effort is also meant to support the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) “Improving Vulnerability Identification, Management, and Remediation” directive, according to CISA.

In a blog post published Wednesday, CISA Assistant Director Bryan Ware said the agency’s Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 20-01 reflects its “renewed commitment to making vulnerability disclosure to the civilian executive branch as easy conceptually as dialing 911.”

“This directive is different from others we’ve issued, which have tended to be more technical – technological – in nature,” he said. “At its core, BOD 20-01 is about people and how they work together.”

Catherine Marsh, director of the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), said IARPA’s cloud infrastructure enabled the agency to support employees who have transitioned to telework during the COVID-19 pandemic, SIGNAL Magazine reported Tuesday.

“One of the major accomplishments at IARPA has really been our seamless transition to a remote working environment in the cloud,” Marsh said. “That’s because, unlike most of the intelligence community, most of our work is not classified, and we were really prepared ahead of time with an approved, secure, cloud-based virtual environment, and we were able to pivot quickly at having everybody work safely in isolation away from the office.”

Marsh offered updates on IARPA’s work on the Little Horned Owl unmanned aerial vehicle program and mentioned the agency’s efforts to hire new office directors, who will help recruit program managers, develop research programs and link program managers to intelligence agencies.

“We look for experts to challenge the status quo and to help shape and structure new programs with metrics and milestones and rigorous testing and evaluation to demonstrate that the proposed solutions will meet intelligence community needs,” she added.

The U.S. Army is working on a prototype of a mid-range missile that can home in on moving ground and maritime targets, Defense News reported Wednesday.

Robyn Mack, a command spokeswoman, told the publication the service’s decision to advance the mid-range missile is meant to meet a near-term need aimed at complement other critical platforms in its portfolio of long-range precision fires (LRPF) to support multidomain operations.

The Army’s LRPF portfolio includes hypersonic weapons and the Precision Strike Missile. The service’s move to advance the mid-range capability stemmed from a strategic fires study completed by Army Futures Command’s Research and Analysis Center earlier this year.

Mack said the study sought to “examine future strategic fires capabilities and provide emerging insights to inform procurement options and future materiel capability requirements.”

The Department of Defense’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) plans to come up in the next six months a document that will serve as a guide for the implementation of five ethical principles in the use of AI, FedScoop reported Friday. A small team within JAIC is now working on pilot programs focused on ethics training.

Alka Patel, head of AI ethics policy at JAIC, told the publication she intends to make “ethics a natural part of the way we all think” and believes testing and evaluation could be one of the approaches DoD could use to advance the ethical application of AI.

“We have tried to build ethics into every piece of the test and evaluation process,” said Jane Pinelis, head of testing and evaluation at JAIC.

The report said the center’s testing strategy has several angles, including the assessment of AI against preset requirements and analysis of direct operational testing and human-machine relationship.

The Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded $72 million in funds to 27 projects for the development of carbon capture technologies meant to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Eighteen projects will receive $21 million to build materials and technologies designed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, DOE said Tuesday.

The department has earmarked $51 million to nine projects for the provision of initial engineering studies for approaches that will capture carbon dioxide from industrial sites.

"The primary mission of our office is to ensure that the United States can continue to rely on its fossil fuel resources for clean and secure energy," said Steven Winberg, assistant secretary for fossil energy at DOE.

Winberg added the department seeks to mature and commercialize the technologies to the market.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released a joint advisory on incident response and threat mitigation to help federal agencies in cyber incident investigations.

CISA said Tuesday the “Technical Approaches to Uncovering and Remediating Malicious Activity” guidance collates data from a research effort that the agency launched along with partner entities in the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

According to the notice, incident response guidelines detailed in the playbook encompass a "variety of technical approaches to uncover malicious activity. When hunting and/or investigating a network, it is important to review a broad variety of artifacts to identify any suspicious activity that may be related to the incident,” the guidance states.

The international team also provided information on specific procedures such as searching indicators of compromise (IOC), frequency analysis, pattern analysis and anomaly detection as part of the research effort.

Michael Kanaan, director of operations at the U.S. Air Force’s artificial intelligence accelerator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), said the service must prioritize generating “quality” data for training AI models, FedScoop reported Tuesday.

Kanaan told attendees at the AFCEA AI and ML Technology Summit that the Air Force should leverage the Joint AI Center’s (JAIC) Joint Common Foundation platform to collect high-quality data instead of using lower-quality data sets.

“You should try to set policies for those words ‘training’ and ‘quality data’ in your contracts,” he noted.

Dave Spirk, chief data officer of the Department of Defense (DoD), also said at the event that his office is working to establish a data strategy for the whole department by the month’s end.