The Cybersecurity Sprint: Are we safe yet?

August 7, 2015 / G C Network / Comments Off on The Cybersecurity Sprint: Are we safe yet?

NJVC to Spotlight Cloudcuity at Gartner Data Center Conference

By G C Network | November 15, 2012

Las Vegas., Nov. 15, 2012 — NJVC, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, announces it will spotlight its Cloudcuity™ framework for delivering secure and unified cloud management…

NJVC Cloud Expert Kevin L. Jackson Launches Second Book: GovCloud II: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Services

By G C Network | November 9, 2012

VIENNA, Va., Nov. 8, 2012—NJVC, an information technology (IT) solutions provider headquartered in northern Virginia, is pleased to announce that Kevin L. Jackson, vice president and general manager, cloud services,…

Virtustream a Visionary in Gartner 2012 IaaS Magic Quadrant

By G C Network | October 27, 2012

Congratulations to NJVC Cloudcuity partner Virtustream for being positioned as a visionary in the Gartner 2012 IaaS Magic Quadrant! Magic Quadrants provide a graphical competitive positioning of four types of…

GovCloud II: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Services Now Available

By G C Network | October 22, 2012

I’m happy and proud to announce the release of my second book, “GovCloud II: Implementation and Cloud Brokerage Services” by my publisher Government Training Inc.   The public and private…

NJVC® Introduces Cloudcuity™ AppDeployer to Create and Sell Software Applications

By G C Network | October 18, 2012

Developers Can Create, Deploy and Publish Apps in the Cloud for Free Vienna, Va., Oct. 18, 2012 — NJVC®, an information technology (IT) solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, introduces…

NJVC® Announces the Cloudcuity™ Government Marketplace, Powered by Virtustream’s Secure Cloud xChange

By G C Network | October 4, 2012

Vienna, Va., Oct. 4, 2012—NJVC®, an information technology solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, and Virtustream, Inc., a leading enterprise cloud software company, today announced a new alliance to provide…

Cloudcuity™: Thought Leadership Translated to Operational Excellence

By G C Network | September 26, 2012

As my long time readers have certainly noticed, the frequency of my posts have lengthened over the past few months. First, I would like to offer my apologies for being…

NJVC® Unveils Cloudcuity™ Umbrella Framework for NJVC Cloud Services

By G C Network | September 13, 2012

Vienna, Va., Sept. 13, 2012 — NJVC®, an information technology (IT) solutions provider headquartered in Northern Virginia, introduces Cloudcuity™, a new framework for the company’s cloud service offerings to help…

NJVC® Announces SaaS Accelerate: Specialized Infrastructure Hosting and Managed Services Program for Software-as-a-Service Providers

By G C Network | August 25, 2012

VIENNA, Va., Aug. 15, 2012 —NJVC® announces the release of NJVC SaaS Accelerate, a specialized infrastructure hosting and managed services offering designed to support the business needs of software-as-a-service (SaaS)…

Texas Cloud Computing Lessons Learned

By G C Network | August 12, 2012

Late last week  the Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) released an important whitepaper that reviewed it’s multi-year Pilot Texas Cloud Offering (PTCO). This project was designed to allow a…



UPDATE: NBC News reports U.S. officials have disclosed a hack of the Pentagon’s Joint Staff unclassified email system, which took place on July 25.

Recent unauthorized access to a U.S. government database led to thecompromise of information on at least 21.5 million individuals. This massive background investigation data breach also compromised usernames, passwords, mental health records and financial information. Although a security update applied by the Office of Management and Budget (OPM) and the Homeland Security Department (DHS) in January ended the bulk of the data extraction, the U.S. government-wide remediation efforts were extended by launching a 30-day Cybersecurity Sprint.

This action was done to assess and improve the health of all federal assets and networks. Agencies were instructed to immediately patch critical vulnerabilities, review and tightly limit the number of privileged users with access to authorized systems and dramatically accelerate the use of strong authentication, especially for privileged users.

Last month, federal CIO Tony Scott reported significant progress with the sprint citing significant progress that included:

  • A Federal Civilian agency increase in the use of strong authentication for privileged and unprivileged users from 42 percent to 72 percent
  • An increase in the use of strong authentication for privileged users from 33 percent to nearly 75 percent
  • The implementation of strong authentication across 95 percent of privileged users working in thirteen agencies, or more than half of the largest agencies – including the Departments of Transportation, Veterans Affairs, and the Interior Department



Although I applaud these recent efforts the Federal government has a very long way to go before anything like “Mission Accomplished” can be claimed.

One major and costly challenge will be in the area of software development. A recent analysis, State of Software Security by Veracode, that rated application security by using compliance with Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10 vulnerabilities recommendations as a yardstick found a “low pass rate” in government applications. This dismal finding was theorized as being the result of a:

  • Higher use of scripting languages
  • More prevalent use of older languages which are known to produce more vulnerabilities
  • Low rate of software remediation (e.g. fixing flaws)
The four most important vulnerability categories listed by the study are SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), cryptography issues and command injection. This is due to the pervasiveness and severity of these vulnerabilities, specifically:

  • SQL injection was the application vulnerability most often exploited in web application attacks in a recent 2015 data breach Incident
  • Cross-site scripting is overall far more prevalent than any other category
  • OS command injection played a role in 2014’s Shellshock vulnerability, in which a commonly used open source component was exploited in a way that allowed taking over a server to run arbitrary code
Government developed software has performed poorly by having the highest prevalence of both SQL injection and cross-site scripting when compared to other industry rates.

To improve on the current sad state of government cybersecurity, the Federal Information Security Management Reform Act (FISMA Reform), has been proposed as a new bill. This legislations offers five major initiatives designed to improve the overall security posture of federal networks:

  • Grant DHS authority to operate intrusion detection and prevention software across the .gov domain
  • Authorize DHS to conduct regular risk assessments on federal networks
  • Require DHS to enact defensive countermeasures in the event an intrusion is detected
  • Strengthen and streamline authority Congress gave to DHS last year to issue binding operational directives to federal agencies, especially to respond to substantial cybersecurity threats in emergency situations
  • Mandate annual OMB reports on enforcement of government wide cybersecurity standards
As citizens we all place a significant amount of trust in our government’s ability to defend and protect society and our way of life. In the modern world this trust extends into our cyber life as well. Although individuals still need to take more responsibility for how they manage and protect their own information, our government needs to look at how they are managing our data and protecting information. National security needs to be a priority to all. 
FY 2015 Q2 (4/15) vs. Cybersecurity Sprint Results (7/29)
(https://www.performance.gov/node/3401/view?view=public#progress-update)

( This post was written as part of the Dell Insight Partners program, which provides news and analysis about the evolving world of tech. For more on these topics, visit Dell’s thought leadership site Power More. Dell sponsored this article, but the opinions are my own and don’t necessarily represent Dell’s positions or strategies.)

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