ASMC The Business of Defense

  • President Barack Obama met with a handful of corporate leaders for a personal chat on cybersecurity. Attendees came from the IT, energy and financial worlds. They included CEO's of Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Intel, Bank of America, Visa and Mastercard. The National Institute of Standards and Technology released a cybersecurity framework last week. It's voluntary. Now the government has to convince industry to adopt it. The public has 45 days to comment.

    October 30, 2013
  • The House Armed Services Committee is going to try again to change the way the Pentagon buys weapons and services. The committee's chairman, California Representative Buck McKeon, said some successful efforts were already under way to institute meaningful reforms, but the U.S. military acquisition system faces significant challenges including cost overruns and schedule delays. He predicts the problems will get worse because of mounting pressure on U.S. budgets.

    October 30, 2013
  • In his first public comments since the portal launched, federal CIO Steve VanRoekel said agencies and contractors can learn from the problems the website encountered. He said many times big failures provide the opening for major changes.

    October 30, 2013
  • Terry Verigan, vice president of CompuCure, will discuss best practices for small businesses that do work for the federal government. October 29, 2013

    October 29, 2013
  • With the partial government shutdown behind them, members of Congress are working on several bills that impact the federal workforce, including a resolution that supports ending the federal pay freeze and a bill that tackles the claims backlog at Veterans Affairs.

    October 29, 2013
  • The Syrian Electronic Army seized control of an online tool used by an advocacy organization for President Obama and redirected links sent from Obama's Twitter and Facebook accounts. The pages carried links that were intended to take readers to a Washington Post story on immigration, but as a result of the hack, redirected readers to a video of the Syrian conflict instead. The hacked link shortener is used by Organizing for Action, a group that evolved from Obama's re-election campaign. Obama's Twitter account itself was not hacked.

    October 29, 2013
  • A British man is arrested and charged with hacking into computer systems of the Army, NASA and other federal agencies. On Monday, a grand jury indicted a British man and his three partners for stealing information about government employees with the intent of disrupting federal government operations. Lauri Love allegedly hacked thousands of systems including the Missile Defense Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA. For almost a year Love was able to infiltrate systems, compromising personal data of military personnel and defense budgets. Prosecutors says the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland was one of the hacked systems. Love faces up up to 5 years in prison for each offense.

    October 29, 2013
  • Kimberley Williams Chief Strategist – Public Sector Informatica A public sector enterprise software veteran, Kimberley Williams brings over 20 years of implementation, technical sales, and marketing experience from enterprise software giants including Curam Software, PeopleSoft,…

    October 28, 2013
  • Chris Howard Director of Sales, Federal Chris Howard is a Director of Federal sales for the Nutanix team. He has been selling into the Federal Government for 15+ years with an emphasis on Virtualization and…

    October 28, 2013
  • Virtualization is at the heart of these programs, and government's failure rate has been high due to unwieldy, expensive and complicated infrastructure. The ramp-up of virtualization efforts in government requires agencies to take into account infrastructure-related challenges such as scalability, complexity, cost, performance and more. And more agencies are rolling out virtualization solutions that allow Bring-Your-Own-Device users to stay productive no matter where, or how, they work.

    October 28, 2013
  • Dave Gwyn VP, Federal Nutanix Dave Gwyn has a BS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park. His experience includes three years of programming on NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope program, followed by…

    October 28, 2013
  • The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, is hosting a multi-year competition for fully automatic network defense systems that can evaluate software and root out security threats. DARPA released rules for its cyber grand challenge last week. Applications will be due by June. The final event would be in 2016. The winning team receives two-million dollars in cash.

    October 28, 2013
  • The National Security Agency says its Web site was down for a bit over the weekend. The agency says the system encountered an internal error during a scheduled update. The NSA says the site was NOT hit with a denial-of-service attack, countering speculation on social media.

    October 28, 2013
  • Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and New Zealand Minister of Defense Jonathan Coleman met in Washington Monday to discuss expanding defense cooperation between two countries. During the gathering, both Hagel and Minister Coleman highlighted the decade long cooperation between the two during the war in Afghanistan. And they confirmed that cooperation on peacekeeping will be expanded into capacity building activities in the Asia-Pacific region.

    October 28, 2013