Amy Hess, executive assistant director of the FBI, said the bureau is working to establish partnerships with companies to better respond to cyber threats since the private sector manages approximately 95 percent of the country’s infrastructure, Federal News Network reported Monday.

“And we have to develop those relationships from a government perspective with private sector to ensure that for number one, for starters, that were notified when it is happens, because the sooner we can get involved, the sooner we can identify who it is, the sooner we can identify their [tactics, techniques and procedures], and the sooner we can stop them, hopefully from doing it again,” Hess said on the network’s Agency in Focus – Justice Department.

She noted that the bureau serves as the lead agency for threat response as part of a three-pronged effort to help protect the industry from cyber attacks.

“What the FBI is doing in the meantime, and the Justice Department, is trying to identify who did it. What are the techniques, tactics and procedures they’re using, to identify who it comes back to? … Who did it and then, ultimately, to hold them accountable, so that we can either bring them to justice or to reveal their identities, and essentially make life difficult,” Hess added.

Hess said the FBI is working with Microsoft, Mastercard and other companies on a talent recruitment program that aims to assure employees jobs in the private sector once they complete a two-year stint with the bureau.

The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center has established a facility in Pittsburgh, Pa., that will provide training services to engineers and operators. The Advanced Technology and Training Center is slated to open on April 29 and will serve to validate potential technologies for the U.S. Air Force’s sustainment enterprise, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base said Friday.

The center’s employees will cater on projects in the areas of robotics, automation, artificial intelligence in a move to apply them to Air Force needs.  In addition, the facility will create predictive maintenance algorithms to confirm aircraft concerns through the use of AI methods.

“Part of the reason we chose Pittsburgh is because the area is known as an innovation hub, and there are numerous opportunities to collaborate with local universities and industry,” said Debbie Naguy, chief of product support engineering division at AFLCMC.

The Department of Labor will integrate a new algorithm into its continuous monitoring dashboard to identify and track vulnerabilities of the agency’s information technology assets, FedScoop reported Friday. The new Agency-Wide Adaptive Risk Enumeration tool was built under the Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation program to monitor millions of assets across the entire federal government. 

Scott Davis, deputy chief information security officer at DOL, said the agency already started working with AWARE to expand cybersecurity. The algorithm will monitor vulnerabilities and misconfigurations across agencies and provide scores indicating the risks and the need to address the issues. Agencies can use AWARE to compare their scores to each other and the federal average.

The government plans to begin the tool’s soft rollout to all agencies on Oct. 1, and CDM aims to release the updated version of AWARE in fiscal year 2020. 

Ellen Lord, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment and Wash100 Award winner, announced new efforts to improve how the Pentagon will identify the companies at risk of cyber attacks, USNI News reported Friday.

“So what I’ve mandated is, this year we will come up with a National Cybersecurity Standard with metrics, and we will develop third-party independent auditors who can go and audit against those cybersecurity standards,” she said at a recent U.S. Naval Institute meeting. “In that way, we will be able to discriminate between a company that is really cyber-secure and one that is not.”

The Department of Defense will provide small businesses with secure cloud-based platforms to develop their software and plans to rethink security requirements to help companies do more business with the agency.

DoD is also working on a Trusted Capital Marketplace, which will guide the agency in selecting contractors to receive funding to help secure the industrial base. Lord said the marketplace may come out in the next three or four weeks.

Efforts at the Department of Homeland Security’s new Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will focus on improving cybersecurity of industrial control systems, federal civilian networks, election security and supply chain through 2020, GovTech reported Sunday.

Jeanette Manfra, assistant director for cybersecurity at CISA, said part of the agency’s top priorities is to protect connected devices and the “.gov” networks amid the expanding cyber capabilities of adversaries. 

“We have seen advanced persistent threat actors, including cyber criminals, nation states and their proxies, increase the frequency and sophistication of malicious cyber activity,” she told Dan Lohrmann of GovTech in an interview. “They are developing and using advanced cyber capabilities in attempts to undermine critical infrastructure, target our livelihoods and innovation, steal our national security secrets and threaten our democracy,” she added. 

To address threats to critical infrastructures, supply chain and the upcoming election, Manfra said CISA is working on increased coordination with government officials, industry and international partners for risk management.