Author page: William Jackson

The term “computer glitch” has become a shorthand way of avoiding responsibility for failures when information technology doesn’t work. With IT underlying so much of our lives and economy we should expect to know what went wrong and why. It has been a…

More than a decade after its creation, agencies of the Homeland Security Department still are not able to effectively communicate with each other. A bill now awaiting the president’s signature would require DHS to create a strategy for interoperable communications. Since its formation…

Some governmentwide programs offer the promise of improved security in federal information systems, but cybersecurity remains a high risk area and threats to sensitive personal information continue to grow. After almost 20 years on the Government Accountability Office’s (GAO) list of high risk…

As the administration “sprints” to close gaps in federal cybersecurity and Congress rushes to judgment on breaches of federal personnel data, the real problem is a lack of accountability and responsibility in both the executive and legislation branches. In the wake of potentially…

The White House has established an HTTPS-only standard for federal websites, requiring all public sites to use the encrypted connection protocol within 18 months. Agencies can leverage private sector experience in making the switch. Declaring that Americans deserve a high level of assurance…

Major back-to-back breaches at federal agencies illustrate a vicious circle in cyberattacks: Personal information stolen in one breach is being reused to enable secondary breaches. Expect data stolen from OPM to be used elsewhere.  More bad news this week on the cyber front.…

The adoption of IPv6 is opening up new attack vectors for Denial of Service attacks as researchers probe the next generation of Internet Protocols for weaknesses, according to the most recent State of the Internet—Security report from Akamai. Distributed Denial of Service attacks…

Microsoft is ending support for its Windows Server 2003 in July, and millions of servers the still are running the OS. It already is too late for many to plan an orderly migration to a current OS, but some steps should be…

The latest entrant in the increasingly crowded field of proposed cybersecurity legislation appears to offer adequate protections on personal information as well as appropriate corporate shields. We’ll see. There is a new entrant in the increasingly crowded field of proposed cybersecurity legislation. The…

The latest Cyber Strategy, released this week by the Pentagon, refines the nation’s strategic goals in cyberspace and recognizes for the first time the DOD’s responsibility to protect private sector networks that are not necessarily critical infrastructure.  The Pentagon has released its latest…