Entegra Systems has partnered with 16 other companies to engineer and secure cyber technology platforms for the Department of Defense under a potential five-year, $70M contract.
The industry team will also create data models to increase DoD’s cyber knowledge as well as provide data science and cyber defense services, Entegra said Thursday.
Source: Entegra to Help Engineer DoD Cyber Systems Under Potential $70M Contract – GovCon Wire
When a data breach occurs, companies will usually haul in third-party investigators, notify regulators, promise to do better and give any impacted consumers free credit monitoring — but we’ve reached a stage where you should consider signing up to such services anyway, given how much of our information is now available in data dumps strewn all over the internet.
(Consider using Have I Been Pwned to check if you’ve been involved in a breach.)
The reasons a cyberattack or data breach occur vary. In some cases, such as Equifax, the failure to patch a known vulnerability that has the potential to impact software or libraries in use — and in a reasonable timeframe — has serious repercussions.
In others, unsecured databases left exposed to the internet may be the problem, zero-day vulnerabilities may be exploited in the wild before fixes are available, or in some of the worst cases, an organization or individual may be targeted by state-sponsored advanced persistent threat (APT) groups with substantial resources and tools at their disposal.
Source: These are the worst hacks, cyberattacks, and data breaches of 2019 | ZDNet
Under the new framework, dubbed the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification, all vendors doing business with the Defense Department will be required to be certified by a third-party assessor as fully compliant or be prohibited from being awarded the contract. The department is moving at a pace to have the compliance regime in place by mid-2020.
Arrington said that by codifying CMMC compliance, the department can—and will, by her assertion—consider it as an allowable cost of having the required certification level. By Arrington’s assessment, this will not only ensure that defense contractors have a base level of cybersecurity, but also that they are getting paid a reasonable amount to maintain that security.
Source: What the Defense Department’s Cyber Certification Will Mean for Small Businesses – Nextgov
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded BAE Systems a contract to develop a pair of cybersecurity tools designed to protect electronic information as part of DARPA’s Safe Documents program.
BAE said Tuesday its FAST Labs organization and American University will work as teammates under the first phase of the SafeDocs initiative to create a tool to automatically process digital files and identify safe features for data encoding.
The partnership will also create a toolkit for software developers who aim to prevent cybersecurity risks in platforms intended to process electronic data formats.
Source: BAE Selected to Develop Cybersecurity Tools for DARPA’s SafeDocs Initiative – GovCon Wire
The Defense Department is hoping large defense contractors will be cyber mentors for small businesses and startups as it rolls out its new cybersecurity standard next month.
Ellen Lord, DOD’s acquisition chief, told reporters during a Dec. 10 briefing the department was attuned to small businesses cost-related concerns of its new Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification. While there’s no mandate at work, Lord said big companies and industry associations should pitch in with help as the standard is implemented in 2020.
Source: DOD wants prime contractors to be ‘help desk’ for new cybersecurity model — FCW
On Earth, optical communication via fibre optic cables connects continents and provides enormous data exchanges. This is the technology that allows the cloud to exist, and online services to be provided.
Optical communication between satellites doesn’t use fibre optic cables, but involves light propagating through space. This is called “free space optical communication”, and can be used to not only deliver data from satellites to the ground, but also to connect satellites in space.
In other words, free space optical communication will provide the same massive connectivity in space we already have on Earth.
Some systems such as the European Data Relay System are already operational, and others like SpaceX’s Starlink continue to be developed.
Source: We’re Using Lasers and Toaster-Sized Satellites to Beam Information Faster through Space – Nextgov
Modulation is fundamental to electronic communications. The modulating signal might be analog in nature (voice or music) or digital bit streams. Most modern communication systems are digital, using discrete levels of amplitude or phase to represent the data being transmitted. The more unique conditions that can reliably travel from a transmitter to a receiver, the more data you can send in a given period of time.
Quadrature modulation is widely used in digital communications systems up to and including 5G.
The basic idea behind modulation is to control one or more parameters of an RF carrier by the modulating signal. Mathematically, we can express this as shown above.
Source: Quadrature modulation: The signal behind digital communications | EDN
Here’s the way I put it back in the early 2000’s: “The struggles of these two powerful, yet quite different wireless networks—the much-heralded 3G (telecom) and the dark horse known as Wi-Fi—will determine the direction of wireless technology for years to come. As a result, design engineers, market investors, chip manufacturers, and infrastructure vendors are closely watching this evolving struggle.” (Penton’s Wireless Systems Design magazine)
Today, however, the battle has far less to do with communication vs computational dominance and more to do with global infrastructure and spectrum conflicts between the US DoD, China and the rest of the world.
But before we get into that, a very brief overview of telecom vs. datacom history is needed.
Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon platforms are aimed squarely at bringing 5G devices to consumers next year.
This week, at its annual Snapdragon Tech Summit, the chipmaker unveiled two new mobile computing platforms – the Snapdragon 765 and 865 – both targeted at 5G speeds and artificial intelligence processing for Android-based devices.
“We need systems that put 5G and AI together,” Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager, mobile at Qualcomm, told the Tech Summit audience. He outlined Qualcomm’s roadmap for 2020, where the company plans to be a part of 5G devices released at all tiers, with AI also ubiquitously integrated into them.
Vodafone Idea may face closure following India’s Supreme Court ruling forcing the joint venture to $4 billion.
According to the Financial Times, Kumar Mangalam Birla, owner of Idea Cellular, one half of Vodafone Idea, has said that the company may have to close if New Delhi does not intervene and stop the billon-dollar charge.
“I think that’s the end of the story for Vodafone Idea,” she said to the FT. “It doesn’t make sense to put good money after bad. So that would be the end of the story for us. We’d shut shop.”
Source: Vodafone Idea on the brink of closure after $4bn charges
