President Barack Obama has released a notice to extend for another year the national emergency he declared in April 2015 through an executive order to address the rising incidents of cyber attacks launched by threat actors overseas.

“These significant malicious cyber-enabled activities continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” Obama said in a statement issued Tuesday.

The president added that corresponding measures that took effect in 2015 to address such cyber threats will continue to be implemented as part of the national emergency.

The national emergency continuation comes amid the Justice Department’s efforts to put on trial several foreign individuals allegedly involved in various forms of cyber attacks.

In March, a federal grand jury in New York indicted seven Iranian citizens on charges related to their roles in launching distributed denial-of-service attacks on U.S. financial services institutions from December 2012 to September 2013.

A Chinese national also pleaded guilty in March for his involvement in a conspiracy to hack U.S. defense contractors’ computer networks in order to steal military technical data on fighter jets and transport aircraft and send the stolen information to China for financial gain.

The Defense Department has partnered with San Francisco-based company HackerOne to carry out a “bug bounty” program that will involve vulnerability identification and analysis on public DoD websites over a 20-day period.

DoD’s digital service team will lead the Hack the Pentagon initiative that is scheduled to run from April 18 to May 12, the department said Thursday.

“This initiative will put the department’s cybersecurity to the test in an innovative but responsible way,” noted Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.

The department has allocated about $150,000 in funds to support the program.

HackerOne has opened an online registration for the Pentagon’s bug-hunting effort and will find qualified external hackers to help DoD identify and examine website security flaws, the company said Thursday.

The company has worked with multiple commercial firms to help them implement vulnerability coordination and bug bounty programs.

A new study by Tenable Network Security indicates a high level of confidence among organizations in the cybersecurity framework of the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is the preferred security framework for 70 percent of the respondents in Tenable’s Trends in Security Framework Adoption Survey, the company said Tuesday.

Tenable also reveals in the study that at least 50 percent of respondents believe the adoption of the framework requires a high level of investment.

“Historically, [chief information security officers] have been hesitant to take full advantage of the NIST cybersecurity framework because of a high investment requirement and a lack of regulatory mandate,” said Tenable CEO Ron Gula.

“This is changing as organizations begin to shift their mindset from moment-in-time compliance with frameworks like PCI DSS to continuous conformance with the NIST cybersecurity framework,” Gula added.

Market research firm Dimensional Research conducted the survey of more than 300 U.S. security professionals to gauge the adoption patterns of security frameworks.

The survey also points to organizations currently implementing or planning to implement only some of the NIST framework’s technical controls.

Tenable said its SecurityCenter Continuous View product works to automate NIST framework adoption by providing visibility into the IT environment.

The Department of Homeland Security has said it has received 321 reports of ransomware-related incidents from 29 federal agencies, The Hill newspaper reported Wednesday.

Cory Bennett writes DHS noted that there were no cases in which agencies paid threat actors due to the inability of the malware to infect the agencies’ network infrastructure.

According to The Hill, Justice Department reported that there were 7,694 ransomware-related complaints filed with its Internet crime complaint center and that threat actors generated ransom payments worth more than $57 million since 2005.

Aliya Sternstein also reported for Nextgov that DHS and DOJ disclosed the figures in response to a pair of Dec. 3 inquiry letters on ransomware attacks issued by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Tom Carper (D-Del.).

Carper, a ranking member of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, told Nextgov the Senate panel will continue to investigate cases of ransomware-linked extortion across the federal government.