GovConJudicata Weekly Debrief (1/16–20)

This week's Weekly Debrief covers GAO's report on cyber recommendations, NSA's red team to attack JWCC providers, NIST's potential cyber updates, OFPP's unified training and certification standard, and NASA's lunar solar array.

Cyber

NextGov – Majority of GAO's Cyber Recommendations Since 2010 Have Gone Unresolved

• "The Government Accountability Office said in a report on Thursday that federal agencies have not implemented almost 60% of the cybersecurity recommendations issued by the watchdog since 2010, potentially undermining their ability to safeguard sensitive information."

BreakingDefense – NSA red team will attack JWCC providers to test zero trust security

• "Zero trust, but verify: That’s the strategy the Pentagon is experimenting with for its new private-sector cloud providers. Beginning this spring, red-team hackers from the National Security Agency — and possibly the armed services’ red teams as well — will launch a months-long series of attacks on zero-trust security systems on clouds run by Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle, according to the head of the Defense Department’s zero-trust office."

FedScoop – NIST working on ‘potential significant updates’ to cybersecurity framework

• "The National Institutes of Standards and Technology intends to release version 2.0 of its Cybersecurity Framework in the coming years, and this week, the agency teased some of the “potential significant updates” that may land in that new framework."

Acquisition

FedNewsNet – OFPP bringing all contracting officers under one training, certification standard

• "The Office of Management and Budget is solving two long-standing issues for contracting officers with the stroke of a pen, and months of effort. A new memo obtained by Federal News Network details how the Biden administration will bring the entire federal government — Defense and civilian agencies — under one education and training standard for contracting officers."

NASA

SpaceNews – NASA suspends efforts to fully deploy Lucy solar array

• "NASA is suspending efforts, at least until late next year, to try to fully deploy a solar array on its Lucy spacecraft, citing diminishing returns as the spacecraft heads away from the sun. In a statement quietly posted on NASA’s website Jan. 19, the agency said the latest effort to latch one of two solar arrays on Lucy, more than a month earlier, failed to complete the deployment of the circular array and lock it into place. That effort, NASA said, 'produced only small movement in the solar array.'"

. . .

#govcon