The Government Accountability Office has said the binding operational directives issued by the Department of Homeland Security have been effective in helping federal agencies strengthen their cybersecurity posture.

For instance, agencies were able to mitigate about 2,500 of the 3,600 detected cyber vulnerabilities within 30 days in response a 2015 directive on critical vulnerability mitigation, GAO said Tuesday.

Other DHS directives GAO cited that have helped improve federal cybersecurity are the 2016 directive on Threat to Network Infrastructure Devices and the Securing High Value Assets initiative.

The congressional watchdog also found that DHS faces challenges when it comes to meeting the requirements of the directives and validating self-reported actions of agencies.

GAO offered four recommendations to help DHS address such issues, such as developing a strategy to validate agencies’ self-reported measures on fulfilling the directives’ requirements using a risk-based approach and determining when to coordinate with the National Institute of Standards and Technology and other stakeholders in the directive development process.

Mark Esper, secretary of the Department of Defense and a 2020 Wash100 Award winner, said in a memo that the Pentagon’s $740B budget request for fiscal year 2021 would advance weapons modernization, support service members and strengthen alliances in support of the “irreversible implementation of the National Defense Strategy,” Military Times reported Tuesday.

The department’s priorities cited in Esper’s Jan. 27 memo to top military leaders include the development of directed energy and hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems; creation of a joint warfighting concept; allocation of funds to nuclear deterrence and homeland missile defense; and establishment of the Space Force.

The White House is expected to release its FY 2021 budget proposal on Feb. 10.

Bill Evanina, director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, said the Office of the Director of National Intelligence will publish a new strategy to further advance sharing of cyber threat data with industry, Nextgov reported Tuesday.

“As the new strategy gets rolled out Monday we are going to take a look at a whole of nation approach, a whole of society approach to defending what we believe are true to our values, our laws, our morals,” he said Tuesday at an Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology-hosted event.

Evanina said the president signed on Jan. 8 the 2020 counterintelligence strategy, which he said reflects a “paradigm shift.”

“I think right now the intelligence community is going to be forced, and is probably late to this, to look at the private sector as a constituent of the information we collect. We haven’t necessarily done that,” he said.

The Department of Labor has updated its electronic labor certification issuance operations as part of a $3.5M information technology modernization effort, the Federal News Network reported Monday. Under the Technology Modernization Fund, DOL deployed a platform that enabled the department to establish a mobile app for labor certifications.

Gundeep Ahluwalia, the chief information officer of DOL, told the publication that the department also consolidated its login.gov functions as part of the initiative. He noted that DOL was also able to implement a hybrid cloud using Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure offering and the department’s own data center.

“The one good thing is that all our infrastructure is consolidated and centralized,” Ahluwalia said.

According to Ahluwalia, DOL focused on updating basic IT commodities, modernizing applications and “making sure that the citizen-facing services were improved” over the past four years in an effort to meet technology modernization goals.

The U.S. Air Force intends to hold an event that will launch four challenge activities under the AFWERX Space Challenge program.

According to a notice on the Beta SAM website posted Saturday, the four challenge activities will cover the areas of space-asset resiliency, Department of Defense commercial space partnerships, global space transport and delivery and persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.

The service branch encourages space operators and DoD stakeholders to air concerns and collaborate with various people during the event, while members from the academic and private sectors are also invited to participate.

The AFWERX Challenge initiative seeks to push small businesses, startups, large enterprises, research laboratories and members from the academe in developing approaches that may address gaps in the Air Force.

The U.S. Army has launched an effort to use artificial intelligence to process imagery from manned and unmanned systems that will help warfighters identify incoming threats, FedScoop reported Monday.

The AI-driven systems, known as Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors, will collate data from airborne systems as well as vehicles and autonomous platforms in real-time. Soldiers can also use mobile devices to customize ATR-MCAS data appearing o their feed.

“In essence, the systems are all about being able to provide situational awareness in the form of these systems that are unmanned,” said Lt. Col. Chris Lowrance, the autonomous systems head for the Army’s AI Task Force.

Lowrance noted that the sensors will support teaming arrangements between soldiers and AI-driven systems while reducing risks to warfighters in the frontline.

He added that the Army plans to continue partnerships with academic entities and expand ATR-MCAS capabilities over time to include features such as pattern recognition.

Thomas Modly, acting secretary of the U.S. Navy, told his service branch to focus on hypersonic weapons this year, USNI News reported Friday.

The secretary issued a memo, titled SECNAV Vectors 9, that emphasizes the need to be at the lead of hypersonic weapon development due to the technology's increasing significance in the battlefield.

The service branch will conduct hypersonic weapon tests year-round, as per Modly's message.

“As we begin the transition from a development effort to fielding capability, production facilities are ramping up to meet high capacity demand,” Moldy said in the memo.

The Navy's Hypersonic Glide Body would enter testing this spring under the service's plans, the secretary said.