Jane Edwards

A team of security professionals at Google has identified over 12 government-backed hacking groups that use the COVID-19 pandemic as bait for malware and phishing attempts. Google said Wednesday one group used COVID-19 messages and U.S. fast food franchises as phishing lures to zero in on U.S. government personnel's personal accounts.

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Maxar Technologies has completed installing the fuel tank into the On-Orbit Servicing, Assembly and Manufacturing-1 spacecraft. The company is developing for NASA the OSAM-1 spacecraft, which is based on the 1300-class spacecraft platform and designed to refuel satellites in low-Earth orbit, Maxar said Thursday.

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Patrick Perry, director of emerging technology for federal, defense and intelligence community at Zscaler, wrote in an opinion piece published Wednesday on Fifth Domain that the Department of Defense should strike a balance between security and operations as it moves its workforce to a teleworking environment. He said DoD should shift its focus from network security to data security to support teleworking and manage large data volumes and increasing bandwidth requirements.

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IBM announced that it is offering free access to its portfolio of patents to help companies, scientists and other innovators develop technologies that could be used to detect, prevent and treat COVID-19.

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Mitre has issued the results of its assessments of cybersecurity platforms from 21 companies to help industry and government agencies improve their capabilities to detect and combat cyber threats. Mitre evaluated the cyber offerings using its ATT&CK knowledge base to emulate the techniques used by APT29, a cyber threat group believed to be related to the Russian government, the nonprofit corporation said Tuesday.

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Chris Howard, vice president of U.S. public sector at Nutanix, wrote in a GCN article published Tuesday that federal agencies seeking to provide employees access to data and applications in a more flexible way during the COVID-19 pandemic should consider adopting desktop-as-a-service platforms.

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Mark Forman, vice president of digital government strategy at Science Applications International Corp., wrote in a commentary published Monday on FCW that government chief information officers should help agency leaders understand the importance of adopting cloud, artificial intelligence, big data analytics and other digital government tools as they transition from response to the recovery phase during the coronavirus pandemic.

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Alan Balutis, a Distinguished Fellow and senior director for North American public sector for Cisco Systems’ global strategy and consulting arm, wrote in a FedScoop article published Friday the lack of authority of agency chief information officers could be one of the reasons why agencies are slow to transition to the General Services Administration’s $50B Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions telecommunications contract. 

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The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued interim Trusted Internet Connections 3.0 telework guidance and Stephen Kovac, vice president of global government  at Zscaler, said the document requires cloud service providers to submit telemetry data to the National Cybersecurity Protection System’s EINSTEIN team, FedScoop reported Thursday.

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