The Cybersecurity Sprint: Are we safe yet?

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

SOA-R!! Another Hit !!

By G C Network | October 9, 2008

Yesterday’s SOA-R event coverage by TECH Bisnow Washington was yet another indication that cloud computing is real in the Federal space. Thanks goes to Mr. Dave Stegon from Bisnow on Business and Pauline Healy from Apptis.  Thanks…

World Summit of Cloud Computing, December 1-2, 2008, Wohl Centre, Ramat Gan, Israel

By G C Network | October 8, 2008

I am proud to announce that I’ve been invited to speak at the “World Summit of Cloud Computing“, December 1-2, 2008, at the Wohl Centre in Ramat Gan, Israel. As…

MIT Survey: What A Response !!

By G C Network | October 7, 2008

We’ve been quite surprised by the number of survey responses we’ve received.  THANK YOU !!  That subset of the cloud computing community interested in national security and public sector applications…

Cloud Auction Business Model

By G C Network | October 3, 2008

The other day I talked about how cloud computing could change the government’s budgeting process. Well what about this! Last week, Google filed a patent application that describes a system…

Oracle: To Cloud or Not To Cloud …

By G C Network | October 2, 2008

First Oracle’s Larry Ellison bashes cloud computing as nothing but hype and then his company announces that it will let customers run Oracle 10g and 11g databases and its Fusion…

Capacity planning in a cloud environment

By G C Network | October 1, 2008

In her post “Cloud computing killed the capacity star“, Ivanka Menken brings up some good points. Just think what changes this could bring to the government budgeting process. The trends…

Cloud Databases

By G C Network | September 30, 2008

Joab Jackson, in his “Cloud computing leaving relational databases behind” article, makes some pretty interesting points on the incompatibility of relational databases with cloud-based infrastructures. He first list the various…

The 6 layers of the Cloud Computing Stack

By G C Network | September 29, 2008

From Sam Johnston’s Taxonomy post Clients (examples) are computer hardware and/or computer software which rely on The Cloud for application delivery, or which is specifically designed for delivery of cloud…

Thank You KMI Media Group

By G C Network | September 26, 2008

In this month’s Editor’s Perspective, Mr. Harrison Donnelly announced the new KMI Media Group collaborative effort. Military Information Technology will be using the blogosphere to get their government and industry…

VMware, Cisco and the Virtual Datacenter

By G C Network | September 26, 2008

Last week, VMware and Cisco announced their latest collaboration for the virtual datacenter of the future. The Cisco Nexus® 1000V distributed virtual software switch is expected to be an integrated…



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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