The Department of Defense (DoD) awarded Howard University with a $90 million military research contract that focuses on military applications of autonomous technology.  It’s a watershed moment for Howard University indeed, both due to the size of the contract for a university, and that it makes Howard the first historically Black institution to receive such a contract.  As such, Howard will serve as the 15th University Affiliated Research Center (UARC).

Senator Mark Warner (D-VA), who chairs the Intelligence Committee, released a report stressing the importance of cybersecurity and urging Congress to act. 

According to Warner, healthcare “...is the most attractive or lucrative part of ransomware. People’s personal health information is even more valuable than financial information.  Nobody’s in charge. I went to go see the org chart again, and I counted four separate Cabinet secretaries that touch health care cybersecurity. You do need somebody in charge. Cyber is always an afterthought. It has to be built into health care as new applications and even treatment modalities are created.”^[1]

Ukraine just inched even closer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO_ - at least in terms of cybersecurity - by signing an agreement with NATO regarding participation with NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre (CCDCOE), the accredited research and training facility dealing with education, consultation, lessons learned, research and development in the field of cyber security.

The National Industrial Security Program (NISP) Enterprise Mission Assurance Support Service (eMASS) - the official system of record for the NISP Risk Management Framework (RMF) Assessment and Authorization (A&A), turns four years old on May 06, 2023. 

Unit 61398 is a group within China’s People Liberation Army (PLA) that has been linked to a wide range of cyber-attacks aimed directly at the United States for purposes of espionage.  The unit is said to be housed in a 12-story building near Shanghai containing thousands of cybersecurity professionals operating under direct government orders from the Chinese government. 

North Korea’s state-run cyber operation is known as Bureau 121, believed to be established approximately in 1998 by then-leader Kim Jong Il.  Professor Kim Heung-Kwang, a North Korean defector, readily admits that during his more than two decades at Hamheung Computer Technology University, he trained countless students on the very foundation of computer networks. And the best and the brightest of these students? They were pulled out and given extensive training in cybersecurity.

Ukraine suffered an almost threefold growth in cybersecurity attacks over the past year, according to Viktor Zhora, the Deputy Chairman and Chief Digital Transformation Officer at the State Service of Special Communication and Information Protection of Ukraine.  Zhora's comments came while visiting London to discuss cybersecurity strategy with the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a part of GCHQ.  Tom Tugendhat, UK Security Minister, noted that there is a real fight "...against Russian barbarism goes beyond the battlefield” and terror inflicted on civilians. “There is the real and persistent threat of a Russian cyber-attack on Ukraine’s critical infrastructure.”

The NIST Cybersecurity Framework - Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity  - last updated to version 1.1 in April, 2018, could have “Potential Significant” changes in the near future.  On January 19, 2023, NIST published NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 Concept Paper: Potential Significant Updates to the Cybersecurity Framework, which it stated the following:

After years of failed voluntary, self-assessment cybersecurity compliance mandates, the Biden administration is moving aggressively in launching a series of heavy-handed regulations in hopes of shoring up America’s cyber defenses.  According to James Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, “It’s a break from the previous strategies, which focused on information sharing and public-private partnership as the solution…This goes well beyond that. It says things that others have been afraid to say.”