Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has highlighted a person’s affection for the U.S. as a factor the government should consider in the hiring process for cyber talent, Federal Times reported Tuesday.

Carten Cordell writes Johnson discussed the issue of cyber talent recruitment in conjunction with the Department of Homeland Security budget for fiscal year 2017 before the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

Johnson also noted the effort of Suzanne Spalding, undersecretary for DHS’ National Protection and Programs Directorate, to implement the Cybersecurity Enhancement Act of 2014 and to speed up the hiring process, Cordell reports.

Johnson told the committee DHS currently works with critical infrastructure to share threat intelligence and protect the network from cyber attacks, Federal Times reports.

Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work has issued a memorandum that directs all components of the Defense Department to update their information systems and devices to the Microsoft-built Windows 10 Secure Host Baseline operating system, DoD News reported Tuesday.

The decision to deploy the Microsoft Windows 10 SHB “is based on the need to strengthen our cybersecurity posture while concurrently streamlining the IT operating environment,” Work wrote in the Feb. 26 memo.

Cheryl Pellerin writes the memo was addressed to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, service branch secretaries, defense agency directors, defense undersecretaries and field activity directors at DoD.

Work issued the memo nearly in the wake of a November 2015 directive from Terry Halvorsen, DoD’s chief information officer and an inductee into Executive Mosaic‘s Wash100 for 2016, for the Pentagon to subject 4 million seats to the Windows 10 SHB update and complete that deployment within a year.

The U.S. Marine Corps has reached the final stage in the development of a new hardware technology that aims to deliver communications security and availability across multiple platforms.

The Marine Corps Systems Command will continue its work on the Secure Communications Controller to support communications between U.S. and foreign military partners as well as between emergency personnel and first responders, the Marines said Thursday.

“Previously, marines were limited in their ability to communicate between disparate communications systems,” said Basil Moncrief of MCSC’s Marine Air-Ground Task Force Command, Control and Communications program office.

The report said the Marines developed SCC as part of the Small Business Innovation Research program.

The 15-pound SCC is capable of connecting with tactical radios, cellular networks, land mobile radios and VoIP and has previously been tested during the Ssang Yong exercise in South Korea in 2014.

According to the Marines, SCC will undergo capabilities tests at the 2016 Ssang Yong exercise.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology‘s Internet Time Service received requests from 316 million unique Internet Protocol addresses on two out of 20 NIST servers to represent 8.5 percent of all Internet-connected devices.

This data comes from one month of a study conducted on the service published on Tuesday for the first time, NIST said Tuesday.

NIST physicist Jeff Sherman and co-author Judah Levine studied two of NIST’s 20 time information servers for the “Usage Analysis of the NIST Internet Time Service” report due to their accessibility and capacity to host 25 percent of total traffic.

Levine, an NIST fellow, conceptualized and built most of the Internet Time Service software that NIST has operated since 1993, NIST noted.

The service’s 20 timeservers are located at 12 sites across the country and are linked to the NIST time scale, which the agency estimates to receive 16 billion requests per day as of January 2016.

Eighty percent of 103 state legislators and staffers that responded to a Governing Institute-led survey identified cybersecurity as a top priority for them but 80 percent are unsure if their state governments have a plan in place for cyber emergency incident responses.

Seventy-two percent of respondents placed their state’s cyber risk level between moderate and high but only 18 percent of surveyed lawmakers are members of a committee specifically mandated to address cybersecurity issues, the Governing Institute said Monday.

AT&T and the National Cyber Security Alliance worked with the Governing Institute to carry out the survey.

“The purpose of the survey was to examine current baseline cybersecurity knowledge of state elected and appointed officials in order to identify educational needs regarding this topic,” said Todd Sander, Governing Institute vice president of research.

“We found that, although legislators know the risks are high, many are not as involved as they could be and significant cybersecurity gaps remain.”

Forty-three percent of respondents said their state has inadequate cybersecurity funds, half said their locations do not have enough cyber workers and 43 percent cited lack of understanding about risks to computer networks as an issue.