In the annual Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) report to Congress, which the administration made public on Aug. 16, OMB says the number of cy...
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Fiscal 2018 marked the first time in 12 years that federal civilian agencies suffered no major cyber incidents.
The Office of Management and Budget said of the 31,107 cyber incidents agencies did face last year, none reached the threshold established in the 2007 and updated several times over the last 12 years.
In its annual Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) report to Congress, which the administration made public on Aug. 16, OMB said the number of cyber incidents dropped by 12% as compared to 2017.
The fact that agencies didn’t suffer a major cyber incident, which OMB defines as one that impacts national or economic security and/or one that effects more than 100,000 people, and that the number of overall incidents went down is significant. In 2017, OMB reported the number of cyber attacks that reached the major incident threshold increased by 14%.
The administration called the progress “encouraging,” but warned that threats and bad actors will continue to go after agency systems and data.
“[E]mail-based threats remain prevalent, with email/phishing continuing to be a highly-targeted attack vector. According to information provided by [the Department of Homeland Security], 6,930 incidents occurring in the past year,” the report states. “Moreover, nearly 27% of all incidents did not have an identified attack vector, which continues to suggest that the government must take additional steps to help agencies identify the sources and vectors of these incidents.”
Some other interesting findings from the 2018 FISMA report:
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Jason Miller is executive editor of Federal News Network and directs news coverage on the people, policy and programs of the federal government.
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