Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of Homeland Security, said in a statement that the recently passed FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 would increase the government’s capacity to protect U.S. citizens from drone-induced threats.

She highlighted that existing regulations constrained the Department of Homeland Security’s jurisdiction to address drone threats prior to the bill’s passing, the DHS said Thursday.

“The department’s lack of authorities also prevented us from testing truly needed drone-defense technologies,” Nielsen said.

“Today Congress took a major step forward to address these vulnerabilities,” she added.

Nielsen highlighted the bill’s role to help the government detect, track and mitigate armed and threatening unmanned aerial vehicles in the country’s airspace.

To conclude her statement, the secretary thanked members of Congress who were instrumental to the bill’s passing.

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018 renews the Federal Aviation Administration‘s authority as a federal agency and includes provisions that allow the government to attack drones threatening to national assets.

Patrick Shanahan, deputy secretary of defense, recently said that the U.S. military will be pursuing hypersonic weapons as a joint effort between service branches, adding that development initiatives would be in line with future funding requests, CNBC reported Wednesday.

“Part of what we are doing is figuring out how many do we need, how do we make this more modular, and how do we stand up the industrial base that goes along with this,” Shanahan said while making assurances that the U.S. will operate hypersonic weapons “sooner and more often than people have ever expected.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled a new hypersonic missile in March, while China announced in August that it had successfully tested a hypersonic aircraft.

Hypersonics, which can travel at a speed of roughly one mile per second, are weapons that the U.S. cannot defend against at present.

President Trump has released a new strategy meant to protect the U.S. from evolving terrorist threats.

The White House said Thursday the National Strategy for Counterterrorism centers on identifying terrorism sources, separating terrorists from their support system, modernizing American counterterrorism tools and preventing extremist radicalization and recruitment, among other things.

The new approach also stresses on building and strengthening secure borders and points of entry, protecting critical infrastructure and ensuring readiness.

The Trump administration additionally aims to boost America’s local and international partnerships such as with NATO allies to increase support for counterterrorism projects.

“The National Strategy for Counterterrorism recognizes the full range of terrorist threats that the United States confronts within and beyond our borders, and emphasizes the use of all elements of national power to combat terrorism and terrorist ideologies,” said Trump in the foreword of the counterterrorism document. 

The Depart of Veterans Affairs has formed a commission to search for potential candidates to fill the leadership position for the Veterans Health Administration.

Members of the search commission will work to identify individuals with the required knowledge, vision and dedication to serve as the undersecretary for health, the VA said Thursday.

The department will evaluate potential candidates based on their expertise in medicine, health care administration and policy formulation.

The individual appointed for the position would oversee VHA’s $74B annual budget covering health care programs catering to over 9 million veterans at 1,200 facilities.

The search commission consists of: \n

• Anthony Principi, commission chairman
• Don Wright, deputy assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services
• Garry Augustine, executive director at nonprofit Disabled American Veterans
• James Adams, senior vice president and chief medical officer at Northwestern University
• Jim Byrne, VA acting deputy secretary
• Jon Perlin, chairman at the Special Medical Advisory Group
• Jonathan Simons, president and CEO at the Prostate Cancer Foundation
• Sarah Verardo, executive director at the Independence Fund
• Thomas McCaffery, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense health affairs at the Defense Department

The Defense Information Systems Agency has begun an effort to align the architecture of the Acropolis cyber defense network with the agency’s latest operational requirements.

The Where We Fight program involves adding non-classified and classified cloud environments, a private network and a data brokering program in Acropolis to increase the productivity of cyber analysts and save costs, DISA said Thursday.

Matthew Matzer, program manager Acropolis and chief of operations for DISA’s CENTAUR infrastructure, explained cloud environments will also support the initiative of the Defense Department‘s chief information officer to leverage cloud computing systems.

“Conducting a cloud migration at the same time will help us meet DoD requirements, reduce operating costs and speed up the availability of services for analysts,” he added.

DISA is also redesigning Acropolis with the ability to collect data with cross query capabilities and enable analysts to use the cyber defense network’s workstations through a virtual desktop architecture. 

The agency plans to wrap up WWF in 2021.

Acropolis is designed to collect, store and analyze network traffic on non-classified and secret internet protocol router networks and DoD enterprise services to detect and counter cyber attacks on the DoD Information Network. 

The Senate has passed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Act of 2018, which renames the Department of Homeland Security‘s National Protection and Programs Directorate as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal News Radio reported Thursday.

Christopher Krebs, undersecretary for the NPPD, approved the bill’s passage, saying that the new name “clarifies and clearly signifies our mission” and will “help significantly in terms of recruiting.”

The piece of legislation will also reorganize NPPD. What will eventually be known as CISA will be made up of three divisions: the Cybersecurity Division, the Infrastructure Security Division and the Emergency Communications Division.

Meanwhile, some offices currently placed under the NPPD will be relocated to other parts of the DHS.

The piece of legislation, however, will have to go back to the House for another vote, the House Committee on Homeland Security press office said. The version of the bill that the Senate had approved came through with two amendments.

Katerina Megas, program manager for National Institute of Standards and Technology‘s Cybersecurity for Internet of Things program, said in a recent summit that agencies must be aware of challenges that IoT brings in cybersecurity, FCW reported Thursday.

Megas leads a program seeking to establish cybersecurity standards that would guide federal agencies’ usage of IoT devices.

The agency opened the draft of these standards for comments and suggestions and will continue accepting responses through Oct. 24.

“We plan on starting to release iterative discussion documents to talk about if there were a baseline for IoT devices,” Megas told FCW at the Internet of Things Global Summit.

These discussion documents are intended for release before the final version of the IoT standards undergoes publishing, the report noted.

Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has announced that the Pentagon has completed a review that examines the country’s capabilities against missile threats, Defense News reported Thursday.

Shanahan said Wednesday at a media roundtable that the Defense Department has not yet scheduled the release of the missile defense review, which he said has been finalized “for quite some time.”

He noted that DoD is working to integrate the findings of the MDR strategy into its fiscal 2020 budget proposal that is expected to be completed in the next couple of months.

He hinted that the budget request will be based on DoD’s National Defense Strategy, National Posture Review and the White House’s National Security Strategy.