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Michael Daniel: ‘Einstein’ a ‘Credible’ Cyber Defense Tool for Federal Agencies
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Michael Daniel: ‘Einstein’ a ‘Credible’ Cyber Defense Tool for Federal Agencies


Michael Daniel
Michael Daniel

White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel has said he believes the Einstein tool that works to detect and monitor network vulnerabilities is still a “very credible and solid piece” of the federal agencies’ defenses against cyber threats, FCW reported Thursday.

Sean Lyngaas writes Daniel made the remarks at a New America think tank event held Thursday in Washington.

The federal government runs an “incredible array of legacy systems that if we were in the private sector we would probably just write off,” Daniel said.

“But the government can’t just do that.”

His statements surfaced after the Government Accountability Office released last month an audit report, which found that the Einstein program did not consistently identify and prevent vulnerabilities and malicious content in federal networks’ web traffic.

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Darlene Costello Named Principal Deputy Asst Sec for Acquisition, Logistics at USAF
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Darlene Costello Named Principal Deputy Asst Sec for Acquisition, Logistics at USAF

 

Darlene Costello
Darlene Costello

Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James has appointed Defense Department veteran Darlene Costello to serve as principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition and logistics at the military branch.

Costello succeeds Richard Lombardi, who has been reassigned to a non-acquisition role within the Air Force, the service announced Thursday.

She has served as principal deputy assistant secretary for acquisition at the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics since September 2014.

In that capacity, she advised DoD leadership on military and business system acquisition, strategic, space, intelligence, tactical warfare and command and control matters.

Costello previously held the role of deputy assistant defense secretary for strategic and tactical systems on an acting basis as well as principal director of S&TS and director of acquisition and program management at DoD.

She also worked at the U.S. Navy, where she oversaw 15 shipbuilding programs and associated weapon systems as its deputy director for naval warfare.

 

Mark Welsh Pushes for Maintenance Shift to F-35
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Mark Welsh Pushes for Maintenance Shift to F-35


Gen. Mark Welsh
Gen. Mark Welsh

Gen. Mark Welsh, chief of staff for the U.S. Air Force, has called on lawmakers to either authorize a shift of maintainers to the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter or grant funds to train additional aircrews, Air Force Times reported Friday.

Phillip Swarts writes Welsh testified before the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee to discuss the 2017 budget proposal for the Air Force.

Welsh said the service needs new planes and must end its reliance on legacy aircraft, according to the report.

“The platforms and systems that made us great over the last 50 years will not make us great over the next 50 years,” Welsh told lawmakers.

Previously, the Air Force attempted to transition its resources and maintenance crew to the F-35 fighter from the A-10 Thunderbolt II, Swarts reports.

Air Force Times reports the service decided to sustain the A-10 through 2022 under the fiscal 2017 budget plan.

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David Bowdich Named FBI Associate Deputy Director
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David Bowdich Named FBI Associate Deputy Director


David Bowdich
David Bowdich

David Bowdich, formerly assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, has been named associate deputy director of the bureau, its third-ranked executive position.

The FBI said Thursday Bowdich will be responsible for the agency’s non-operational divisions and branches and be succeeded at the LA office by Deirdre Fike, special agent in charge of the FBI’s division in Anchorage, Alaska.

Bowdich joined the FBI in 1995 as a special agent and served as a SWAT member, sniper and gangs and violent crimes investigator during his assignment at the bureau’s San Diego field office.

The former New Mexico detective and police officer helped the FBI launch the U.S.’ first hybrid squad against kidnapping groups with operations across the U.S. and Mexican border.

His previous roles at the FBI include special agent in charge of the LA office’s counterterrorism division and special assistant to the associate deputy director at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C.

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Jeh Johnson: DHS Continues Efforts to Centralize Agency Processes, Bolster National Security
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Jeh Johnson: DHS Continues Efforts to Centralize Agency Processes, Bolster National Security


Jeh Johnson
Jeh Johnson

Jeh Johnson, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, highlighted the agency’s management reform activities and public safety operations in his remarks Thursday at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.

He said Thursday that DHS works to transform budgeting, acquisition and programming functions under its Unity of Effort initiative to shift away from a stove-pipe organizational system.

During his speech, Johnson also described how DHS and its component agencies such as the Customs and Border Protection, Secret Service, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard have helped protect infrastructure and people across the country.

He added that cybersecurity and counterterrorism will remain the cornerstones of the DHS mission.

“My overarching goal as Secretary this last year is to continue to protect the homeland and leave the Department of Homeland Security a better place than I found it,” Johnson told his audience.

DARPA Develops Neural-Recording Device; Doug Weber Comments
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DARPA Develops Neural-Recording Device; Doug Weber Comments


DARPAThe Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has developed a new neural-recording device built to repurpose stent technology to gather neural data in a less invasive manner.

DARPA’s stentrode is designed for delivery via catheter angiography to pass through a blood vessel in the neck and guided with real-time imagery to reach a certain area in the brain, the agency said Monday.

“DARPA has previously demonstrated direct brain control of a prosthetic limb by paralyzed patients fitted with penetrating electrode arrays implanted in the motor cortex during traditional open-brain surgery,” said Doug Weber, program manager for DARPA’s Reliable Neural-Interface Technology program.

“By reducing the need for invasive surgery, the stentrode may pave the way for more practical implementations of those kinds of life-changing applications of brain-machine interfaces,” Weber added.

The Vascular Bionics Laboratory research team at the University of Melbourne led by neurologist Thomas Oxley confirmed in a Nature Biotechnology article the high-fidelity brain signal measurement from a study performed on a sheep.

Researchers will conduct the first in-human trial of the device in 2017 at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Melbourne, Australia.

DARPA Develops Neural-Recording Device; Doug Weber Comments

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Former HP Exec Kim Luke Joins OMB as IT Category Manager
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Former HP Exec Kim Luke Joins OMB as IT Category Manager


budget analysis reviewKim Luke, formerly a vice president at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, has joined the Office of Management and Budget as the information technology category manager, FCW reported Wednesday.

Mark Rockwell writes Luke will oversee OMB’s efforts to develop governmentwide strategy to address cost and performance matters regarding federal IT resources.

The report said OMB indicated it will appoint nine other category managers on Thursday.

From 2005 to August 2012, Luke was VP of strategic growth for the U.S. public sector at HP Enterprise Services.

He has also previously served as a division VP for financial services, VP for end user computer services within the U.S. public sector division and an account manager at Electronic Data Systems.

He took the executive management program at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1993 and the London Business School from 2002 to 2003.

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IDC: Cloud to Represent 8% of FY 2016 Federal IT Spend, Could Reach 50% Share by 2018
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IDC: Cloud to Represent 8% of FY 2016 Federal IT Spend, Could Reach 50% Share by 2018


cloudA new report by IDC Government Insights predicts overall agency spend on cloud computing technologies for fiscal year 2016 will represent 8.5 percent of the federal government’s overall information technology budget.

That figure represents an increase from the 5-percent share reported for fiscal 2015 as the Federal CIO Council and Office of Management and Budget continue efforts to spur cloud adoption among agencies for their IT system with mobile devices and storage in mind, IDC Government Insights said Thursday.

Cloud spend will reach a total of $6.7 billion in FY 2016 and could represent a 50-percent share of the overall federal IT budget by 2018, IDC says.

Agencies are also changing how they label cloud categories due in part to what IDC calls the “fragmented nature” of the technologies that may not fit under definitions such as infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service.

In FY 2015, the government added an “Other” category to account for cloud-based databases, application programming interfaces, shared services and other platforms and products some federal agencies believe do not fit under the other three categories.

IDC projects spend on “Other” cloud tools to hit $5 billion in FY 2016, followed by IaaS at $1.2 billion, then SaaS at $702.9 million and PaaS at $231.3 million.

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Unisys’ Casey Coleman: DevOps Key to Agile Federal IT Platform Deployment
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Unisys’ Casey Coleman: DevOps Key to Agile Federal IT Platform Deployment


Casey Coleman
Casey Coleman

Casey Coleman, vice president of the federal civilian business group at Unisys, has said she believes the adoption of the development-operations concept can help federal information technology executives achieve efficiency and advance agile processes.

Coleman wrote in a blog entry posted Wednesday that DevOps requires federal agencies to undergo a “culture change” in order to rapidly deploy new IT platforms and services to customers.

Such a change calls for software developer teams and operations infrastructure staff to collaborate in order to identify and address any issues in the project at an early stage, Coleman wrote.

She also noted that NASA and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services are among the agencies that have implemented the DevOps concept in an effort to achieve efficiency.

Coleman said agencies can also facilitate the migration of IT services to cloud environments through DevOps adoption.

“Regardless of where an agency’s culture sits, federal leaders need to bring their own ‘architects’ and ‘builders’ together in a culture of effective and seamless collaboration,” she added.

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DIA’s Vincent Stewart: Cyber, Hostile Intell, Terrorism Key Global Security Challenges
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DIA’s Vincent Stewart: Cyber, Hostile Intell, Terrorism Key Global Security Challenges


Vincent Stewart
Vincent Stewart

Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, has informed the Senate Armed Services Committee that regional security issues, malicious intrusion, transnational terrorism and hostile foreign intelligence activities remain as the biggest threats to the U.S. and its allies.

He said in his testimony Wednesday the security challenges in the Middle East have increased over the past five years and the region’s threat environment has become more unpredictable and dangerous due to the emergence of Islamic State militants.

Stewart also observed that Russia uses military power to dominate smaller regional states as well as prioritizes force modernization, space-based ISR and nuclear weapon programs.

China has launched a multi-year effort to secure sovereignty in the South China Sea, while North Korea continues to grow its stockpile of fissile materials for nuclear weapon development, he told SASC members.

He also reported various security threats in South Asia, Africa and Latin America to the committee.

According to Stewart, DIA is also worried about state actors who aim to access Defense Department systems and networks to gain asymmetric advantage.

“International progress toward agreement on accepted and enforceable norms of behavior in cyberspace may provide an opportunity to limit the scope and scale of nation-state cyber activities and establish parameters for deterrence of malicious cyber operations,” he added.

He believes the Islamic State organization can increase the lethality and pace of the group’s transnational attacks and noted that some U.S. adversaries collect intelligence in order to counter DoD’s strategic and operational missions.

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