Unisys Corporation has announced its support of the CyberPeace Institute's Cyber4Healthcare initiative, a program designed to offer free cybersecurity services to healthcare providers fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, Unisys reported on Tuesday. 

"Unisys is proud to stand with government, industry and academic leaders around the world to safeguard patient data, testing information and intellectual property so that our medical workers on the frontline can focus on delivering care to patients in their hour of need," said Tom Patterson, Unisys chief trust officer. 

Unisys will provide online consultations to help healthcare organizations address the following critical areas of cyber defense and to ensure that medical facilities are protected from cyber threats. Unisys will create a platform to help minimize the effect of ransomware within an organization by leveraging proven strategies like Zero Trust and network architectures like microsegmentation. 

Unisys will work to make cyberspace more secure. Unisys Chairman and CEO Peter Altabef has co-chaired the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee's (NSTAC) Cybersecurity Moonshot initiative, which calls for a "whole-of-nation approach" to create a safer, more resilient internet for government and critical infrastructure services.

The company will also extend cyber perimeters to include work-from-home (WFH) with better identity and encryption practices as well as analyze current cyber risk based on an individual organization's operational goals. 

Unisys Security Solutions will provide "Always On" security, built on a foundation of Zero Trust that grows with an organization's business. Leveraging identity-driven microsegmentation to isolate critical data, Unisys will identify, validate and secure trusted users, devices and data flows. 

Additionally, Cyber4Healthcare will work to stop cyberattacks on hospitals, healthcare and medical research facilities, and for attackers to be held accountable with international law. INTERPOL recently warned that it has detected a significant increase in cyber-attacks against hospitals around the world that are engaged in the COVID-19 response. 

"Protecting the healthcare as any other critical civilian infrastructure is a collective responsibility," said Stéphane Duguin, CEO of the CyberPeace Institute. "We are very excited to work with Unisys to bring assistance to healthcare organizations so they can continue protecting human life during the pandemic."

About Unisys

Unisys is a global information technology company that builds high-performance, security-centric solutions for the most demanding businesses and governments. Unisys offerings include security software and services; digital transformation and workplace services; industry applications and services; and innovative software operating environments for high-intensity enterprise computing.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has awarded Everbridge Patent No. 10,652,080 for its unique approach to “Systems and Methods for Providing a Notification System Architecture,” the company reported on Tuesday.  

“We have the broadest portfolio of patents focused on this industry and continue to innovate in order to help our customers meet increasingly complex challenges, such as those presented by the coronavirus pandemic,” said Imad Mouline, chief technology officer (CTO), Everbridge.

The patent is linked to the Everbridge Notification Engine, which is the central component in the company’s communication solutions responsible for delivery of all messages for its Critical Event Management platform. The innovation will enable the Everbridge system to reliably send large volumes of messages across multiple channels with high throughput and low latency.

Everbridge and its platform reach over 550 million people. As a growing number of organizations relied on Everbridge to mitigate the COVID-19 pandemic, its newly patented Notification Engine handled several times the usual traffic on a sustained basis without outages or expanding cloud infrastructure.

Everbridge’s patent has added to the company’s reliability, built-in system intelligence, data visualization, multi-modal alerting capabilities and crisis management techniques of its Critical Event Management platform. 

The company’s platform has enabled public and private sectors to to manage critical events that pose threats to safety, including the COVID-19 pandemic, active shooter situations, terrorist attacks, severe weather, supply chain disruptions, IT outages and cyber attacks. 

Everbridge recently launched its COVID-19 Shield rapid deployment software templates to protect people and maintain operations amid the pandemic.

Everbridge’s COVID-19 packages will mitigate the impact of coronavirus by leveraging the company’s industry-leading CEM platform to help organizations identify their risks, safeguard their workforce and manage disruptions to their operations and supply chain. 

COVID-19 Shield will offer three new out-of-the-box solutions to help organizations. The individual offerings include Know Your Risks through COVID-19 alerts correlated to an organization’s locations. 

The solution will provide pandemic Situation Reports developed from the world’s largest vetted database of risk data, derived from machine learning analysis of over 22,000 data sources from 175+ countries and validated by a 24/7 team of analysts monitoring local verified sources. 

In addition, COVID-19 Shield will offer “Protect Your People” to manage critical response plans and automate communications with impacted people, responders, leadership and other stakeholders. Protect Your People correlates a specialized Everbridge-developed threat feed on incidences of the coronavirus with the previously visited, last known and expected location of people to help businesses understand the risks and take appropriate actions. 

The solution will provide “Protect Your Operations and Supply Chains” by correlating alerts to physical assets including offices and facilities, production plants, suppliers and supply chain routes, in addition to people. The section will pinpoint potential impacts to your assets and production resources, initiating standard operating procedures to quickly resolve issues.

The COVID-19 Shield packages will also provide access to the Everbridge Data Sharing Private Network, which enables customers to share information publicly or privately. A business, for example, can share information with local government agencies and healthcare facilities to gain more local situation intelligence and to better coordinate response activities.

“Everbridge invested over $150 million in research and development in recent years to bring extraordinary scalability and innovation to our Critical Event Management platform and its underlying technology,” Mouline added. 

About Everbridge

Everbridge, Inc. (NASDAQ: EVBG) is a global software company that provides enterprise software applications that automate and accelerate organizations’ operational response to critical events in order to Keep People Safe and Businesses Running. 

During public safety threats such as active shooter situations, terrorist attacks or severe weather conditions, as well as critical business events including IT outages, cyber-attacks or other incidents such as product recalls or supply-chain interruptions, over 5,200 global customers rely on the company’s Critical Event Management Platform to quickly and reliably aggregate and assess threat data, locate people at risk and responders able to assist, automate the execution of pre-defined communications processes through the secure delivery to over 100 different communication devices, and track progress on executing response plans.

Lisa Costa, chief information officer at U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), said SOCOM’s digital modernization strategy has four points and those are information discovery and algorithmic novelty, operationalization of innovation, global mobility and cyber dominance, C4ISRNET reported Monday.

There are four areas where SOCOM advances modernization and one area Costa cited is improving the efficiency of data transfers.

“We don’t want to move data around the globe, we want to move algorithms to the data, process that information and then send back only that [data] which is necessary,” Costa said.

Rick Jarrell, chief of strategy within the CIO office at SOCOM, said the command is advancing modernization in other areas, such as adopting the Agile Dagger platform in software development and deploying a cloud-based remote desktop on employees’ personal devices.

The U.S. federal government has released a playbook to serve as a guide for agencies to assess and improve the data skills of their employees as part of the Federal Data Strategy. The playbook seeks to help agencies execute Action 4 of the 2020 action plan, which calls for agencies to identify opportunities to enhance their personnel’s data skills.

The document details ways how agencies may approach the four-step process of identifying opportunities to increase staff data skills. The steps are identifying any critical data skills needed for the agency, assessing current staff capacity for needed data skills, performing a data skills gap analysis and executing ways to meet those needs.

Agencies should come up with performance metrics, audit practices, gather implementation and outcome data, assign responsibility and learn from results. They should also share those metrics, results and processes with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and other agencies.

FedScoop reported the action plan originally set a June 30 deadline for agencies to perform an assessment of staff data literacy and data skills, but that schedule was pushed back to July 31 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The playbook supports cross-agency priority goal of leveraging data as a strategic asset in the President’s Management Agenda.

The Department of Defense (DoD) is working with two academic entities to improve energy efficiency in 5G network operations, Federal News Network reported Friday. The University of Texas at Austin and the University of Lille in France have partnered with the U.S. Army Research Office to develop a honeycomb-like framework to allow 5G devices to switch networks with less energy.

Pani Varanasi, division chief of the materials science program at ARO, told the publication that the team’s nanomaterial hexagonal boron nitride framework can be used for mobile phones as well as smart radios, satellite systems and internet of things (IoT) technologies.

Varansi noted that while the switches are currently being used for 4G cellphones, different components are needed to support 5G switching for applications such as smart homes. The team’s concept can help prevent rapid battery drains that result from switching networks and downloading data, he added.

The research and development initiative comes as part of ARO’s research grant program in partnership with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

Derek Tournear, director of the Space Development Agency (SDA), said SDA is working to establish a multilayered space defense architecture to enable direct communication between weapons systems and a tactical data link, DoD News reported Friday.

Tournear told attendees at an Aviation Week-hosted teleconference that the U.S. Army serves as SDA’s "closest partner" to leverage the satellite network to detect beyond-line-of-sight mobile targets and hypersonic missile threats.

He noted that the Link-16 data link technology will support the mesh network’s functionalities related to the targeting of ground and maritime assets as well as the rapid transmission of on-orbit data to the ground.

Such efforts will support SDA’s partnership with the Army for the Titan high-frequency satellite communications program and the U.S. Navy’s similar satcom initiatives once the SDA satellite network goes live, Tournear noted.

Reps. Anthony Gonzales, R-Ohio; Anna Eshoo, D-Calif.; and Mikie Sherrill, D-N.J., have unveiled a bill that seeks to form a committee that will draft a roadmap for a national artificial intelligence research portal.

The National AI Research Resource Task Force Act will work to gather a group of experts from the government, industry and academia to plan the development, implementation, management and sustainment of a cloud-based research portal, the office of Anna Eshoo said Thursday.

Eshoo noted the bill will collect compute power, educational resources and data to support AI researchers in the U.S. Eshoo filed a letter in March to the House Appropriations Committee to ask for the provision of funds for AI research and development efforts.

Sens. Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Cory Gardner, R-Colo.; and Roger Wicker, R-Miss., have introduced the Advancing Artificial Intelligence Research Act of 2020, a bill that will drive an AI research program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.