Mason McDaniel, chief technology officer at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said ATF plans to shut down its remaining data center and transition all applications and data to the cloud by the end of fiscal year 2020, FedScoop reported Monday.

He discussed how a snowfall in 2016 served as a wake-up call for ATF to introduce changes to the bureau’s IT environment as well as the efforts of IT officials to communicate to the bureau’s executives the need to advance the move to the cloud.

“The way you have to communicate to the executives who are largely not technical is trying to take whatever the technical debt is you’ve accumulated through not doing stuff in the past and communicate it in business terms,” McDaniel said. “Again if that data center goes away, then all ATF systems drop offline with no primary and failover and no estimate for times to restore.”

McDaniel cited the need to agencies to invest in invisible IT, his team’s efforts to come up with a governance framework to facilitate the cloud adoption and the start of the transition of data and apps to the Amazon Web Services’ cloud platform.

ATF “is a great example of how thinking big can allow government agencies successfully manage the move to cloud, and retire decades of technical debt,” said Dave Levy, vice president of U.S. government at AWS and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner. “We remain committed to supporting the ATF’s critical mission and for technology to continue driving positive mission outcomes.”

Dean Souleles, chief technology adviser at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said the U.S. intelligence community is advancing the use of artificial intelligence and one of the organizations adopting AI is the CIA’s Open Source Enterprise, Defense One reported Monday.

“Imagine that your job is to read every newspaper in the world, in every language; watch every television news show in every language around the world. You don’t know what’s important, but you need to keep up with all the trends and events,” Souleles said. “That’s the job of the Open Source Enterprise, and they are using technology tools and tradecraft to keep pace. They leverage partnerships with AI machine-learning industry leaders, and they deploy these cutting-edge tools.”

Souleles discussed how AI helps the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency send alerts and navigation data to sailors and mariners and how the technology allows the National Security Agency identify patterns in signals intelligence data.

He also cited training data collection and labeling as one of the challenges to AI adoption.

The General Services Administration has announced the transition of a federal system that allows users to view, verify and modify procurement activities. Reporting functions of the Federal Procurement Data System or FPDS.gov will move to the beta SAM.gov Data Bank by fiscal year 2020's conclusion, GSA said Thursday.

Those who use FPDS for ad hoc reporting are advised to review the attributes of saved reports. This information will serve as a reference if files would require recreation in beta.SAM.gov's upcoming ad hoc tool.

The government will only accommodate conversions for reports created on or before Jan. 31. FPDS.gov will still maintain its current functions following the transition. SAM.gov's beta will feature contract reports in the website's "Data Bank" section.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency is calling on agencies to review the National Security Agency’s guidance on mitigating cloud vulnerabilities to help inform future procurement decisions.

CISA said Friday that the NSA guide covers measures that organizations must take to prevent vulnerabilities such as misconfigurations, shared tenancy risks, poor access control and supply chain risks. Topics also covered in the information sheet include cloud encryption and key management, shared cloud responsibilities and cloud threat actors.

“Clouds can provide a number of security advantages over traditional, onpremises technology, such as the ability to thoroughly automate security-relevant processes, including threat and incident response,” according to the guide. “Security in the cloud is a constant process and customers should continually monitor their cloud resources and work to improve their security posture.” 

CISA’s announcement builds on the agency’s analysis reports on Microsoft Office 365 technologies and advanced persistent threats targeting information technology service providers.

The U.S. Army and Duke University have partnered to address cyber risks that threaten the use of object and facial recognition in artificial intelligence training. Researchers at the university have developed a software that detects backdoor hacking attempts orchestrated against recognition systems, the Army said Tuesday. Army Research Laboratory awarded a nine-month, $60K grant for the effort.

“This work will lay the foundations for recognizing and mitigating backdoor attacks in which the data used to train the object recognition system is subtly altered to give incorrect answers,” said MaryAnne Fields, program manager for intelligent systems at the Army Research Office.

Certain visual characteristics captured by recognition sensors may corrupt data and cause incorrect labels in machine learning platforms.

This case of data corruption would lead systems to generate false predictions. For example, the system would sense a common characteristic and associate that information with only a single, specific person. Hackers may intentionally feed certain characteristics or attributes into learning systems to trigger attacks.

“Our software scans all the classes and flags those that show strong responses, indicating the high possibility that these classes have been hacked,” said Helen Li, who leads the effort with fellow faculty member Yiran Chen.

Afterward, the software locates the region that contains a visual characteristic serving as the backdoor attack’s trigger. Qiao said learning models should then undergo retraining to disregard attributes that have triggered backdoors.