Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Darkreading.com reported that “Federal agencies must protect sensitive data and both thwart bad guys hunting for citizens’ private data and nation-state hackers with their own agendas — in addition to grappling with perennial underfunding, understaffing, and antiquated systems that commercial enterprises tossed into the dumpster years ago. At the same time, they need to make government more accessible and transparent via digital transformation, which inevitably exposes them to more cyber threats.” The April 13, 2018 Report entitled “Federal Agency Data Under Siege” referred to the Thales’ 2018 Data Threat Report—Federal Government Edition which cited:

… 57% of federal respondents reported data breaches, a threefold increase over the 18% recorded back in 2016. As many as 12% experienced multiple breaches in 2017 and in previous years.

Highlighted in the Thales Report was Garrett Bekker (451 Research’s principal analyst for information security) who made these comments:

Like most other sectors, data security spending plans in the US federal sector are up compared to last year — way up,…

Perhaps more importantly, for the first time, the US federal government ranks the highest of any US vertical in terms of spending increase plans — more than nine out of 10 (93%) plan to increase security spending in 2018.

Obviously we need to improve Federal Cybersecurity!