FEDERAL, STATE & LOCAL TECHNOLOGY
MALWARE SCARE: Dept. of Veteran Affairs Takes on Increasing Number of Cyberthreats. When any federal agency sees its malware instances jump 28 percent, month over month, that’s cause for alarm. But when the raw numbers of those malware instances are in the million and billion ranges, it’s even more frightening.
Read more
[FEDTECHMAGAZINE.COM]
IT IN EDUCATION: BYOD, 3-D Printing, Badging Among Top K-12 Trends – Report. Within a year, bring your own device programs and makerspaces will be customary in schools. And in the next five years or so, 3-D printing, adaptive learning technologies, digital badging and wearable technologies will also make their way into classrooms. Read more
[STATESCOOP.COM]
IRS TECH: Sorting Fact From Fiction. The failures are high profile, easy to spot and they just keep coming: billions in bogus tax credits paid out, an abysmal customer service rate around 40 percent and the awarding of millions in employee bonuses amid budget cuts, to name a few. Read more
[FCW.COM]
USA FREEDOM ACT: House Votes to Ban NSA Bulk Collection Program. By a 338-88 vote, the House on May 13 passed the USA Freedom Act, which would prohibit the NSA’s previously secret practice of conducting large-scale, indiscriminate collection of communications records, such as all records from an entire state, city or ZIP code. Instead, it would allow authorities to seek court approval to obtain specific communications records based on a threat to national security. Read more
[GOVINFOSECURITY.COM]
CYBERSECURITY
CYBERCRIME: New ‘Breaking Bad’ Ransom Trojan Is No Laughing Matter, Says Symantec. Windows users across the English-speaking world have been warned to be on the lookout for a new Trojan campaign that borrows imagery from the TV show Breaking Bad as part of a not-so-amusing attempt to extort money from anyone infected by it. Read more
[CSOONLINE.COM]
WHITEPAPER DOWNLOAD: Ransomware – 7 Defensive Strategies. Ransomware attacks fall into two categories: scareware and lockers. Scareware is a social-engineering attack that displays an official- looking notice of a fine, often for the PC having allegedly been used to view pornographic material. Read more
[DATABREACHTODAY.COM]
FOR THE CTO, CIO & CISO
PRIVACY: Cable And Telecom Industries File Emergency Motion To Stop Net Neutrality. Analysts had predicted that the telecom and cable industries would not go down without a fight on the net neutrality debate, and their predictions came true in spades. Read more
[FIERCECIO.COM]
SOCIAL MEDIA: Reddit’s New Anti-Harassment Rules Anger Some Users. Upon learning of Reddit’s plan to change its rules to prohibit harassment and make the site friendlier, some users reacted with resentment and confusion. Read more
[CIO.COM]
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APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT: Blue Mountain Data Systems is dedicated to Application Development and Systems Integration for Federal Civilian Agencies, Document Management Systems that help in the preparation, scanning, indexing, categorizing and quality control of millions of pages of paper documents to electronic format and the Automation of Workflow Processes. Call us at 703-502-3416.
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