The FISMA Focus IPD

Editor’s Note:  One of the issues that federal regulators need to consider in their treatment of network neutrality is how their rules impact minority owned businesses that rely on the internet.  For more on this important issue, see Search Engine Land article here.

From: Slashdot

An anonymous reader sends this quote from an article at Wired:“In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC (PDF) that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don’t give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections, and that the Google Fiber network is perfectly within its rights to prohibit customers from attaching the legal devices of their choice to its network.”

From: Water Online

By Sara Jerome, editor, Water Online

The water sector is watching closely as the federal government moves forward on plans to bolster cybersecurity at private and public entities.

Federal cybersecurity legislation won the approval of a key Senate panel on Tuesday.  The bill would formally give the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) the authority to create voluntary cybersecurity guidelines, an undertaking it has already begun.

Water interests have weighed in heavily on the development of NIST’s cybersecurity framework. Earlier this year, the agency collected comments on how to improve cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, and various water stakeholders voiced their views.

From: FierceSmartGrid

By Barbara Vergetis Lundin

Yesterday, the Senate Commerce Committee passed the CyberSecurity Act of 2013 (S 1353), a bipartisan bill recognizing the importance of industry and government to secure cyberassets, and giving credence to the existing mandatory and enforceable cybersecurity standards that currently govern the electric and nuclear sectors. The bill builds on existing regulatory structures, leverages the progress being made under the Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity Executive Order, and is another step toward fostering improved government-industry coordination to address the evolving cyberthreats to critical infrastructure.

From: FierceGovernmentIT

By David Perera

Changes in the Office of Management and Budget definition of “data center”  are more responsible for the growth in enumerated federal data centers than poor  inventory management, Federal Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel told a  July 25 House panel.

The official tally of federal data centers at the 24 largest agencies as of  July 2013 was 6,836, according to testimony  (.pdf) from the Government Accountability Office–a number that likely  understates the total since only 22 of 24 CFO Act agencies reported; the  Veterans Affairs Department and the Social Security Administration did not  provide an updated inventory.

From: Gizmodo

Like a lot of organizations, NASA’s doing its best to keep up with the times and move its computer systems onto the cloud. Like only a government agency can do, it’s failing fantastically at doing so securely.

A review released on Monday by NASA’s inspector general had nothing good to say about the space agency’s cybersecurity situation. The report found that a large number of cloud initiatives suffered from dangerously poor security, so poor that they would have “severe adverse effects” on NASA if compromised. And out of five contracts reviewed, “none came close” to offering adequate cybersecurity. And on top of that, over 100 of NASA’s internal and external websites were found to have no security measures in place whatsoever.