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DOE Launches Program to Develop Cybersecurity Tech for Power Grid Support; David Turk Quoted
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DOE Launches Program to Develop Cybersecurity Tech for Power Grid Support; David Turk Quoted

The Department of Energy (DOE) has launched a program that will establish cohorts of federal and industry leaders in the energy sector to develop cybersecurity technologies meant to support the evolving power grid. 

In collaboration with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Clean Energy Cybersecurity Accelerator program is aimed at advancing grid modernization and addressing cybersecurity challenges to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, the DOE said Wednesday. 

Cybersecurity technology providers will exchange ideas and experiences while they demonstrate and validate their tools in the lab. 

The proposals will be evaluated through the NREL’s Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems cyber range that has a connection to a 20 MW energy system hardware.

“We are grasping the opportunity to build a grid that can dispatch historic amounts of renewable energy across the country while addressing grid vulnerabilities and positioning America for a clean energy future,” said Energy Deputy Secretary David Turk. 

A steering committee composed of industry stakeholders and a federal advisory board with experts from agencies in the energy sector will provide strategic direction and cost-sharing for the program. 

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Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost Confirmed to Lead Transcom
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Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost Confirmed to Lead Transcom

The Senate confirmed Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost by voice vote Friday to serve as the next leader of U.S. Transportation Command, nearly seven months after President Biden nominated her to the position.

Van Ovost became the first woman appointed to run Transcom and was succeeded by Gen. Michael Minihan in her most recent role as head of Air Mobility Command, the U.S. Air Force said Wednesday.

Her previous assignments include service as deputy commander of AMC,, vice director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and director of mobility forces at U.S. Central Command.

The Air Force Academy graduate logged more than 4,200 flight hours with multiple aircraft platforms such as C-32A and KC-135R.

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Rob Joyce: Weapons Systems Security, Post-Quantum Encryption Among NSA’s Near-Term Priorities
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Rob Joyce: Weapons Systems Security, Post-Quantum Encryption Among NSA’s Near-Term Priorities

Rob Joyce, cybersecurity director at the National Security Agency (NSA) and a previous Wash100 Award winner, said one of NSA’s near-term priorities is ensuring the security of defense weapons platforms and the agency intends to pursue that by taking a holistic approach to assessing those systems to make sure that U.S. citizens have better understanding of the networks underpinning that equipment, Nextgov reported Wednesday.

“We've got now, you know, wings with computers strapped on them. We float computers on the ocean. We launch computers with rocket engines on them,” Joyce said at a summit Wednesday.

“We don't think of our weapons systems and weapons platforms in that way—but in reality, they don't function without those computer networks. How do we harden them, defend them and even instrument them, which is often a gap in that world,” he added.

Joyce said NSA’s cyber teams also want to ensure that the country has next-generation encryption to protect confidential data and communications against potential cyber threats posed by quantum computing.

“So, we've got to be rolling out that post-quantum capability today to secure today's secrets for decades into the future,” he said.

Joyce also cited NSA’s efforts to address the increase in ransomware attacks.

“But what we're doing is stepping up with a surge on ransomware issues to help the FBI, [U.S. Cyber Command], even things like the Treasury and State departments—because what we can do is we can inform their ability to get after the criminals,” he added.

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DOJ Creates National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team; Lisa Monaco Quoted
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DOJ Creates National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team; Lisa Monaco Quoted

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has formed a new team to help conduct investigations and prosecute crimes associated with virtual currency exchanges, money laundering and other cryptocurrency cases.

“Today we are launching the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET) to draw on the Department’s cyber and money laundering expertise to strengthen our capacity to dismantle the financial entities that enable criminal actors to flourish — and quite frankly to profit — from abusing cryptocurrency platforms” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement published Wednesday.

“As the technology advances, so too must the Department evolve with it so that we’re poised to root out abuse on these platforms and ensure user confidence in these systems,” Monaco added.

Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Polite will supervise NCET, which will include attorneys from DOJ criminal division’s money laundering and asset recovery section, computer crime and intellectual property section and assistant U.S. attorneys and will help trace and recover assets as a result of fraud, including payments to ransomware threat actors.

The NCET leader will be chosen based on experience in criminal investigations and cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies and will report to the assistant attorney general.

The newly established team will come up with strategic priorities for cryptocurrency-related investigations, build up and maintain relationships with federal, local, state and international law enforcement agencies, help coordinate information sharing and train federal prosecutors in developing prosecutorial and investigative strategies, among other functions.

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DARPA Seeks Quantum-Based Defense Optimization Problem Solving Tools
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DARPA Seeks Quantum-Based Defense Optimization Problem Solving Tools

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking proposals for a potential $58 million program aimed at developing hybrid systems for the Department of Defense to overcome optimization problems that could affect mission capabilities.

The Quantum-Inspired Classical Computing (QuICC) effort seeks to integrate analog hardware with digital logic processes to create QI solvers for dynamic system emulation, DARPA said Monday.

Participants in the QuICC program will aim to address technical obstacles, such as restricted inter-system connectivity and prohibitive digital resource growth, that prevent the expansion of existing quantum-inspired classical solvers from expanding covering large DOD-relevant cases.

“The goal is to enable a 500X performance improvement in the energy required to solve complex, DOD-relevant optimization problems,” said Bryan Jacobs, a program manager at DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office.

A broad agency announcement posted on SAM.gov stated that the agency expects to award $17 million for the first technical area of the project and $41 million for the second area. Proposals are due Dec. 8th.

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Octo Earns Silver Partnership With Cloud Native Computing Foundation
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Octo Earns Silver Partnership With Cloud Native Computing Foundation

Octo Consulting has become a Silver Partner of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which unites developers, end users and vendors in an ecosystem of open source projects to advance cloud-based innovations.

Mark Wells, vice president of Octo’s DevSecOps Center of Excellence, noted that the partnership is highly selective and that earning it positions Octo as a recognized leader in the modern software industry.

“Being a CNCF Silver Partner tells clients Octo is dedicated to the pursuit of building cloud native software solutions using the best technologies on the market,” Wells explained.

CNCF requires Silver Partners to have Kubernetes administration and development certifications, which Octo’s engineers worked to obtain in pursuit of the high-level partnership.

Wells added that Octo’s achievement of Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP) credentials is an indication of the company’s in-depth experience in containerization, Kubernetes and service-based software architectures relevant in the evolving IT modernization landscape.

Additionally, Octo’s CTO, Sujey Edward said the CNCF partnership signifies Octo’s established capability in building “commercial grade solutions,” especially for the company’s federal government and Department of Defense customers.

The CNCF Silver Partnership is Octo’s latest achievement, in addition to the company’s previously earned Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Gold Partnership. The two partnerships recognize Octo as an advanced software company and further establish the company’s IT capabilities.

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AFRL Gathers Scientists to Discuss DSX Spacecraft Findings; William Robert Johnston Quoted
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AFRL Gathers Scientists to Discuss DSX Spacecraft Findings; William Robert Johnston Quoted

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) gathered scientists from government, industry and academia to discuss the initial results of a 23-month mission that conducted science experiments in Earth's radiation belts. 

AFRL said Tuesday it administered a virtual meeting where representatives from Leidos, NASA, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other organizations to discuss findings of the Demonstration and Science Experiments (DSX) spacecraft, whose mission ended in May.

These discussions revolved around over 1,200 experiments executed with the DSX spacecraft, which was designed to study the radiation environment of medium Earth orbit.

“This meeting was in part, the AFRL science team's thought process to make sense of the hundreds of experiments – to build a comprehensive picture, to explain the unexpected and to move us further in applying our results to benefit DoD missions,” said William Robert Johnston, senior research physicist and principal investigator for DSX.

AFRL will continue to assess the results and publish related content in the next months.

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Francis Collins Ending Tenure as NIH Director
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Francis Collins Ending Tenure as NIH Director

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins will step down from his role by the end of year, concluding a 12-year tenure as the agency's leader.

He will continue to lead a laboratory at NIH's National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which conducts biological studies on type 2 diabetes, the Department of Health and Human Services said Tuesday.

Collins became NIH's director in 2009 under the Obama administration and continued to hold the role in the two succeeding administrations.

He joined the agency when he became the director of NHGRI, which he led from 1993 to 2008. His work at NIH includes leadership over the international Human Genome Project and contributions to research initiatives that tackled cancer, COVID-19 and other health issues.

As NIH director, Collins convinced Congress to boost NIH’s budget from $30 billion to $41.3 billion across his tenure.

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Northrop Grumman Awarded Air Force Contract for GHOST Sensor Development; Ben Davies Quoted
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Northrop Grumman Awarded Air Force Contract for GHOST Sensor Development; Ben Davies Quoted

Northrop Grumman Corporation has been awarded a contract by the U.S. Air Force to design a signals intelligence sensor for high-altitude intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platforms.

The company will employ its space awareness and global exploitation technology capabilities to deliver a prototype sensor with airborne and ground components for the Air Force’s Global High-altitude Open-system Sensor Technology (GHOST) program, Northrop Grumman said Tuesday.

Ben Davies, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and general manager of networked information solutions said, “leveraging our SAGE technology and 45 years of SIGINT mission expertise, our platform-agnostic GHOST sensor is a next-generation intelligence data collection and exploitation system.”

Northrop Grumman’s GHOST sensor prototype will feature an open standards-based hardware and software architecture that will be scalable and configurable for use on multiple types of manned and unmanned Air Force aircraft.

The GHOST sensor’s agile architecture will support ISR missions while enabling rapid system enhancement, testing and integration in anticipation of future advancements and battlespace changes.

This contract award continues the company’s contracted sensor work with the U.S. Air Force. Recently, Northrop Grumman served as the primary research team on a DARPA active electronically scanned array sensor system and facilitated the transition of the system to the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) base in Dayton, Ohio.

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Stratasys’ New Data Security Offering Uses Red Hat Linux Platform; David Egts Quoted
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Stratasys’ New Data Security Offering Uses Red Hat Linux Platform; David Egts Quoted

Stratasys has unveiled a data security platform for additive manufacturing to help meet the cybersecurity requirements of U.S. government and defense agencies as they increase adoption of 3D printing.

The company said Thursday its ProtectAM offering uses the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform, which provides continuous data security in compliance with the requirements outlined in the Defense Information System Agency’s Security Technical Implementation Guide.

David Egts, chief technologist for North America public sector at Red Hat, said the company’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps users meet software security requirements for sensitive computing without compromising scalability, innovation and flexibility.

“We’re pleased to be able to provide this as a foundation for Stratasys as they work to innovate industrial 3D printing and additive manufacturing in the public sector,” Egts added.

Stratasys said its ProtectAM platform will be initially deployed on Stratasys FDM 3D printers, which government clients use to manufacture end-use parts and tools for ground maintenance, aviation and other applications.

The data security platform will also be available on Fortus 450mc and F900 3D printers before the end of 2021 and the company also expects ProtectAM to be fielded on Stratasys F370 and F770 printers by the first quarter of calendar year 2022.

Supply Chain Cybersecurity: Revelations and Innovations

ExecutiveBiz, sister site of GovConDaily and part of the Executive Mosaic digital media umbrella, will host a virtual event about securing the supply chain on Oct. 26. Visit ExecutiveBiz.com to sign up for the “Supply Chain Cybersecurity: Revelations and Innovations” event.

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