The Obama administration has unveiled a national strategy meant to help agencies, companies and individuals bolster defense of their computer systems and sensitive data, the Christian Science Monitor reported Tuesday.

Sara Sorcher writes President Barack Obama’s proposed $19 billion cybersecurity budget for fiscal 2017 includes $3.1 billion for government information technology modernization efforts as part of the Cybersecurity National Action Plan.

“We’re going to prioritize applications in federal agencies that have a high cybersecurity challenge,” U.S. Chief Information Officer Tony Scott was quoted as saying.

The White House also plans to appoint a federal chief information security officer to coordinate data security efforts at civilian agencies, Sorcher reports.

According to the Washington Post, the CNAP also calls for the formation of a new commission to recommend cybersecurity strategies on a national basis and the introduction of a campaign to encourage the public to adopt two-factor authentication and other anti-hacking methods.

The Obama administration seeks to establish the $3.1-billion revolving IT modernization fund at the General Services Administration, according to a story by Nextgov’s Jack Moore.

If approved by Congress, the fund would support incremental efforts to replace legacy government applications that have encountered significant security issues and are expensive to maintain, Moore reports.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has unveiled a new facility in Rockville, Maryland to house projects and operations of the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.

Willie May, undersecretary for standards and technology at the Commerce Department and NIST director, wrote in a blog post published Monday that the new facility expands the laboratory space for NCCoE compared to its previous temporary base.

“We’re grateful to our partners, the state of Maryland and Montgomery County, Md. for co-funding with NIST the renovation of the facility to the center’s specific needs,” said May.

Intel, HP, Hytrust, RSA, Symantec and Splunk are among the private companies that pledged to supply hardware and software products to the center.

The center is a public-private partnership NIST launched in 2013 to help government and industry develop off-the-shelf commercial products intended to help address cybersecurity issues.

A team of U.S. Army researchers has developed an optical metrology scanning system to obtain 3-D measurements and then reproduce new models of specific objects, the Army reported Thursday.

“We had to be innovative and find a better way to solve measurement problems,” said Tyler Sherrod, a mechanical engineer at the service branch’s aviation and missile research, development and engineering center.

“This is important because if a program needs a computer aided design model of their helicopter, AMRDEC can use optical metrology to scan and recreate [the] CAD of the helicopter,” he added.

Benjamin Thomason, metrology team lead at AMRDEC’s weapons development and integration directorate, said the optical metrology tool works to allow users to scan objects with curves and build new components through the use of photogrammetry and structured light system.

AMRDEC plans to use its optical metrology tools by the middle of this month to generate 3-D scans of a U.S. Coast Guard utility boat in order to develop the vessel’s full model and identify any potential defects, Thomason said.

He noted that AMRDEC plans to work with NASA in an effort to advance the use of optical metrology systems.

A hacker claims to have gained access to the email addresses and phone numbers of thousands of FBI and Department of Homeland Security employees using a compromised Justice Department email account, Motherboard reported Sunday.

Joseph Cox writes that the hacker plans to release the obtained information on 20,000 FBI and 9,000 DHS personnel to the public.

An update to the report on Monday noted that a pro-Palestine account on Twitter has already published the details of the DHS employees.

“We are looking into the reports of purported disclosure of DHS employee contact information,” a DHS spokesman told Motherboard in an email.

“We take these reports very seriously; however, there is no indication at this time that there is any breach of sensitive or personally identifiable information.”

Cox reports that the hacker said he used the credentials of the compromised DOJ email account to log in to an online virtual machine, which provided him access to the user’s documents and others in the local network.

The hacker added that he downloaded 200 GB of data — including the job titles and contact information of the FBI and DHS workers — from a DOJ intranet, the report said.