The Department of Defense’s Office of the Inspector General conducted an audit to verify whether DoD assesses cybersecurity risks in commercial off-the-shelf information technology products.

The audit found that DoD employs COTS IT products that hold commonly known cyber vulnerabilities due to lack of associated policy, strategy and product standards, DoD IG said in a report publicly released Tuesday.

The study looked at procurements done via government purchase cards, and discovered that the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force have $32.8M of combined IT product purchases made with GPCs in fiscal 2018.

These purchases include Lenovo computers and GoPro cameras that possess cybersecurity risks.

DoD IG recommends the secretary of defense to order the development of a risk-based evaluation approach for COTS items, an associated testing procedure and a process to prevent purchases of high-risk products.

The office also urges the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment to implement policy that requires organizations to assess cyber risks in COTS products. The recommendation also calls for the establishment of requirements for cybersecurity risk training.

Glenn Fine, the Department of Defense’s principal deputy inspector general, said that the Office of the IG has made a “concerted effort” to reduce its backlog of whistleblower cases, Federal News Network reported Tuesday. 

Fine told attendees that the DoD OIG is looking to deploy artificial intelligence and data analytics to “proactively look for fraud” instead of relying on whistleblowers who use the OIG hotline to report such cases. Assistant IG for Data Analytics David Yacobucci added that these new capabilities, although lacking in certainty, can help DoD investigators and auditors identify trends and nonobvious patterns from large volumes of data.

“Whistleblowers need to have their complaints handled in a timely way, otherwise they will not have confidence in the system,” Fine noted. “I would say that’s one of the key things that needs to be focused on. It is a challenge, given the multitude of complaints we get, but timeliness is very important.”

The National Science Foundation will host a workshop to boost awareness on artificial intelligence applications across the wireless spectrum, Nextgov reported Monday.

The agency said in a federal register notice it will gather government, industry and academia members to participate in the event from Aug. 28 to 29 at Griffiss Institute Center for Information Assurance in Rome, N.Y.

The workshop will tackle the use of AI in future communications networks, spectrum sharing, dynamic spectrum allocation and policy management. Wireless spectrum refers to the medium through which device-based signals travel.

Michael Garris, chair of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s AI Community of Interest, will serve as the workshop’s keynote speaker.

The Department of Energy has awarded $14M in total funding to 10 university-led research projects to develop a new approach to fusion energy production. 

DOE said Monday the collaborative research focuses on understanding and assessing the potential use of magnetically confined plasmas in the development of steady-state fusion reactors. 

It will take place at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility operated by General Atomics in San Diego which houses the largest magnetic confinement system in the U.S. 

The projects range from improving operating diagnostic systems to developing new methods of controlling plasma instabilities and were selected via a competitive process. 

The 10 awarded teams were from leading universities in the U.S. including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University and Columbia University.