Stories about: Office of Management and Budget

As President Bush prepares to leave office, the task of upgrading the security of federal information systems to deal with new cyberthreats continues to be very much a work in progress.

The Internet engineering community is grappling with what to do about a serious flaw in the DNS discovered mid-year, and the ongoing debate brings to mind a famous quotation from Voltaire: "The perfect is the enemy of the good."

The U.S. government has taken several steps to combat identity theft during the past two years, including increased prosecutions of criminals and decreased use of Social Security numbers to identify constituents, according to a report released Tuesday.

The US federal government is locking down its networks through an ambitious and fast-paced effort to eliminate connections to the Internet that are vulnerable to attack.

On June 30, US federal government officials expect to declare an early victory on the IPv6 front. But they admit that meeting their much-heralded June 30 deadline for IPv6 compatibility is just the opening salvo of a long-term battle to get their networks ready for the Internet of the future.

US federal government officials are confident they will meet a June 30 deadline to support IPv6 on their backbone networks, but they see challenges ahead in transitioning their production networks to this long-anticipated upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol.

On Wednesday the US federal government's desktop security mandate kicks in, requiring government agencies to support standard secure configurations for Windows XP and Vista operating systems.

U.S. government agencies need to take additional steps to protect against cybersecurity problems after a series of congressional hearings and reports exposed several weaknesses in 2007, representatives of Symantec said.

Although data encryption adds cost and complexity, business and government sectors are becoming wedded to it -- even though at times it's like an arranged marriage driven by regulatory compliance and fear of data-breach fiascos.

As corporate vice president of Trustworthy Computing (TwC) at Microsoft, Scott Charney is among those at the helm of the company's long-standing efforts to improve the security of its products. In an interview with Computerworld, Charney -- a former federal prosecutor of computer crimes and an assistant district attorney in Bronx, New York, before that -- talked about TwC, the changing threat environment and what security fears keep him awake at night.

U.S. government contractor Lockheed Martin has begun to move part of its network to IPv6 (Internet Protocol version 6) as a way of showing customers how to make the transition, the company said.