The U.S. Army is preparing to implement a Microsoft-developed, web-based app designed to help equipment officers determine the performance effects of new close-combat gear, Military.com reported Thursday.

John Howell, who leads the Army’s Adaptative Squad Architecture program, said the platform would provide quantitative information such as an equipment’s weight. The effort is intended to equip soldiers as whole warfighting platforms and transition away from the approach of fielding equipment pieces individually.

“In order to treat the soldier as an integrated weapons platform, this is the kind of thing you need to be able to do,” Howell said.

The service branch is also evaluating infantry squads at Camp Shelby, Miss., to gather performance data, in addition to the app, said Brig. Gen. Anthony Potts, head of the Army’s Program Executive Office Soldier.

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency released new guidelines to help organizations better protect their systems against ransomware attacks.

CISA listed 15 courses of action such as keeping offline data backups, performing constant system updates, isolating infected systems and reviewing connections with outside entities including customers, partners and vendors. The Department of Homeland Security component also recommended organizations to practice good cyber hygiene, segment networks and establish a good recovery strategy.

“We have assisted many ransomware response and recovery efforts, building an understanding of how ransomware attacks unfold, and what potential steps you can take to better defend systems,” according to CISA. “But we also recognize that there’s no such thing as perfect cybersecurity and ransomware infections can still happen, so we’ve also developed recommendations to help organizations limit damage, and recover smartly and effectively.”

The Department of Defense has established a senior integration group to better oversee and coordinate across counter-drone efforts, National Defense Magazine reported Thursday. Chris O’Donnell, deputy assistant secretary of defense for platform and weapon portfolio management, said this new group will work to address issues across technology, acquisition, operations and policy.

“We’re trying to get decision-makers to understand that there’s a wide variety of things that they can pick to do this stuff,” O’Donnell stated at the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s Defense Protection Security Conference in Washington, D.C.

He also said DoD seeks to improve procurement and accelerate the transition of new technologies to warfighters. To achieve this, the Pentagon plans to pursue rapid procurement programs for emerging technologies, the report noted.

The Government Accountability Office has issued recommendations regarding the Department of Defense’s use of physical access control systems. GAO said Thursday that it found the service branch has not monitored the use of these PACS, and as a result, DoD is not aware of how much these systems are used.

DoD branches use PACS to manage personnel accessibility of military sites. The U.S. Army developed its own PACS, and the other branches use a PACS made by the Defense Manpower Data Center. The department’s Identity Matching Engine for Security and Analysis links to these PACS for assessments of whether a certain individual poses a threat.

While the Army employs performance measures to assess its PACS, DMDC does not, resulting to a lack of evaluation information on the system. GAO recommends various military officials to implement requirements that guide the monitoring of PACS’ use across installations.

Acting Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said service leaders have decided to reform the structure by adopting an industry approach to accelerate the deployment of high-priority weapon systems to warfighters at affordable prices, the Army website reported Thursday.

He said that the Army implemented three measures to improve its procurement decisions: identifying six priorities to counter near-peer or peer competitors, divesting legacy systems to fund those priorities and establishing Army Futures Command on Wednesday during the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Center on Military and Political Power in Washington.

“We truncated the buys on 93 programs and terminated 93 others. We made some very big, hard choices,” McCarthy said. He stated that majority of the Army’s budget for science and technology is being diverted to 31 platforms to support the six priorities.

McCarthy said Congress and other authorities will be monitoring the command’s performance in the coming years. “Field testing will be rigorous, followed by low-rate initial production testing in units at larger scale,” he added.

Christopher Krebs, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and a 2019 Wash100 Award winner, said CISA is collaborating with the Office of Management and Budget and Congress to explore approaches to consolidate civilian agencies’ cybersecurity initiatives, Nextgov reported Thursday.

“The 99 federal civilian agencies all manage their own risk, all own their own networks—that is not a particularly defensible posture,” Krebs said Tuesday during his speech at Auburn University. “In five years, I think you may see a completely different architecture across those 99 agencies.”

Krebs said CISA will act as a security facilitator to help agencies and companies secure their assets. He also discussed CISA’s priorities through a strategic plan released Thursday.

Those priorities include prioritizing risk management to address threats and other vulnerabilities and leading efforts to protect the country’s critical infrastructure while working with other stakeholders. The document also outlined security topics CISA intends to focus on: election security, federal cybersecurity, industrial control system protection, security of soft targets, election security and Chinese supply chain and 5G risks.