In the 1980s, Edward Amoroso was a member of the security design team for then-President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the program that sought to build a space-based shield to protect Americans from a nuclear ballistic missile attack.
Now, as chief security officer at AT&T, Amoroso oversees a strategic defense initiative of a different nature – securing billions of bytes of information as they travel over the airwaves and wires. Keep reading →
The demise of an industry icon, Nortel Networks, as the evidence has now made clear, was the result of a cyber attack. Who could forget Nortel Networks’s place in the technology landscape? While the company is gone, their equipment is still in operations throughout the world.
In an article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, it was reported that hackers had roamed freely inside Nortel’s vast corporate network for over a decade and contributed to the company going bankrupt in 2009.
Indications are that the attacker’s traffic was traced back to China. This came as a result of countless hours poring over log files until the investigators found the needle in the haystack.
According to Brian Shields, a long time Nortel employee and the point person on the investigation, the cyber espionage activities resulted in the exfiltration of technical papers, R&D documents, business plans, emails and other documents. They had full access to very sensitive information about the technology and plans of the company.
For years now, U.S. intelligence organizations and subject matter experts have warned of the vast array of clandestine cyber espionage activities of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC). While some of these activities are the result of organizations in the private sector, the government is often cited as the sources of the acts of espionage. Naturally, the Chinese government has denied these allegations. Keep reading →
The market for federal information security professionals represents stability and opportunity, but at the same time, hiring managers face challenges matching skills with agencies’ cyber security needs, according to a recent survey.
Highly trained and experienced information security professionals already in federal jobs say they are experiencing nearly full employment, coupled with career advancement opportunities and salary increases in 2011, according to the 2012 Career Impact Survey released earlier this month. However, the difficulty hiring managers are having with finding recruits with the right skills presents a continued challenge for the cybersecurity workforce. Keep reading →
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski today called upon the nation’s Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to “take concrete steps” to improve Internet security for consumers and critical infrastructure, warning that a failure to do so could slow broadband adoption and threaten the nation’s economy.
With more than $8 trillion exchanged electronically every year, Genachowski warned that sophisticated hackers are gaining the expertise to “shut down the Internet…shut down our economy [and] compromise our growth engine.” Keep reading →
Not only has cybersecurity started to take shape legislatively, cloud computing security has started to take shape administratively in a meaningful way.
You won’t find huge surprises in the grandly named Concept of Operations (CONOPS) for the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP. The 47-page document does fill out the plan, long promised by The Office of Management and Budget and the General Services Administration. What might be surprising is how elaborate the procedures and project plan turn out to be. Keep reading →
Countries around the world have awoken to the risks of cyber attacks on their systems launched by criminals, hacktivists, terrorists and rogue nation states.
As of January 2012, we found twenty-two countries have established cyber defense centers in an effort to enhance both their offense, defensive and cyber intelligence capabilities. Keep reading →
When we hear that getting incentives right and letting the private sector lead or sharing more information will secure the nation, remember that we’ve spent 15 years proving this doesn’t work.
Some people say the threat is exaggerated. This is unfortunate. We are on course to repeat in cybersecurity the 9/11 error of ignoring risk. Keep reading →
Just two days after introducing the controversial Cybersecurity Act of 2012, Senate lawmakers on Thursday plan to hold a hearing on the legislation, raising concerns that what some are calling a flawed piece of legislation may be on the fast-track for approval by the end of March.
The bill would grant the Department of Homeland Security vast new regulatory authorities over select portions of the nation’s critical infrastructure – everything from the national electric grid to transportation, water and financial services, among others. Keep reading →
For a number of years, there has been a certain relationship between different segments of the federal information technology market. But those relationships are changing as agencies have had to come to grips with stark new budget constraints, which are expected to be reflected in the new federal budget being released by the White House today.
Those changes are already having an important implications for the companies competing for federal IT contracts as well as for the federal and military leaders responsible for acquiring and operating the IT technologies that support their civil and military agency mission requirements.
_____________________________________________
This article was adapted from introductory remarks made Feb. 13 at the 25th Annual Federal Networks by conference chairman, Warren Suss, president of Suss Consulting. For more news and insights on innovations at work in government, please sign up for the AOL Gov newsletter. For the quickest updates, follow us on Twitter @AOLgov.
________________________________________________ Keep reading →
Mobility at work has become the “new normal” for federal employees, but managing mobility continues to create challenges, a new government sector survey concludes.
The report, based on a survey of 414 federal employees and IT professionals, found: Keep reading →