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DHS looks to Silicon Valley innovators for bank cyber-tech

This report originally appeared on CyberScoop.

Banks would be able to hide, move or encrypt their internal IT systems, network traffic and data to hide them from hackers and cybercriminals if technology the Department of Homeland Security is seeking from Silicon Valley startups comes to fruition.

At a Dec. 5 industry day in Menlo Park, California, officials from DHS’ Science and Technology Directorate will roll out the latest offering from their $20 million innovation acquisition program — aimed at startups and other innovative companies that don’t traditionally do business with the federal government.

Unveiled last year, the program uses a special procurement tool called an Other Transaction Solicitation, or OTS, to dole out up to $800,000 in four-phase funding to startups that successfully apply.

The latest offering, dubbed Financial Services Cybersecurity Active Defense, or FSCSAD, asks companies to develop technologies for cybersecurity in banks and other financial institutions.

“Conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the program identifies and evaluates tools that can help the financial services sector defend itself from [cyber]threats,” states the FSCSAD call paper.

Companies must apply to be part of the four-phase procurement process the FSCSAD OTS lays out by Nov. 21 next year and will get a response within 30 days. Each phase — prototype development, further prototype development, pilot testing and operational field testing — will last three to six months and be worth $50,000 to $200,000 to each awardee.

The call offers three areas in which DHS hopes to develop cutting-edge new technologies:

INTRUSION DECEPTION. “While attackers have made heavy use of deception for many years, defenders have typically focused instead on detecting and blocking inbound attacks,” states the call. “Use of deception in cyber defense is desired to misdirect, frustrate, slow down, and/or expose attackers and attack methodologies.” It adds that suitable technologies will use deceptive tactics including obfuscation, decoys, concealment, feints or providing misinformation.

“Deception techniques may target any portion or phase of an attack’s operations, to include reconnaissance, propagation, exploitation, command and control, data manipulation, exfiltration, etc. Technologies may focus on deception for networks, endpoints, applications, or data,” states the call, adding the techniques should “leave little-to-no detectable fingerprints, as their discovery can be used to circumvent and void the solution.”

It gives as an example a technology that would provide “falsely marked credit card data that can later be used to track the movement of the data through and out of the enterprise, and ultimately in the sale of the data in the Darknet.”

MOVING TARGET DEFENSE. MTD technologies cause “controlled change across multiple network and system dimensions in order to increase uncertainty and complexity for attackers, reduce their window of opportunity, and increase the costs of their probing and attack efforts,” the call says, adding that the changes must be “unpredictable by adversaries.”

The call states DHS is interested in several kinds of MTD: “Networks — changing the network topology, including IP-hopping, randomly changing port numbers, and similar capabilities; Hosts (Platforms) — changing host and OS level resources, naming and configuration; and Applications (Run-time) — changing the application environment, including randomly arranging memory layout (e.g., ASLR), changing the application type / versioning, and routing through different hosts, or changing settings, thereby altering the source code at every compilation.”

ISOLATION AND CONTAINMENT. These technologies segment unfamiliar or malicious code before it reaches enterprise systems and study the behaviors to prevent future breaches. This technology attempts to force nefarious software to execute in an isolated, contained environments.

NASA forays into the Internet of Things

Las Vegas — Many of the commercial products around the Internet of Things may just seem like toys, but officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are beginning to use them to connect with citizens in new ways, improve lab operations and even monitor the lab’s information security operations.

“IoT is much more than the devices and the toys that you’ll see,” Tom Soderstrom, JPL’s IT chief technology and innovation officer, said Wednesday at Amazon Web Service’s re: Invent conference.

An example he and a colleague provided: connecting a virtual piano to their firewall data and assigning different kinds of activity a different piano key. It can be running while someone is doing other work, but if they hear unusual sounds or a drastic pickup in sounds it might be an indicator that someone on their cybersecurity team should take action.

“One of our biggest problems is cybersecurity,” Soderstrom said. “And having all of this data flow at you — it’s terabytes of data all the time. We have attempted attacks four million times a day. So how do you deal with it?”

The simple monitoring tool has already been useful at JPL, Soderstom said. He said he and JPL data scientist Mik Cox were doing a demo of the new use case one day, and were talking. All of the sudden, they noticed silence.

“The firewall had stopped playing. Switched to the dashboard and saw that we pegged red, so we picked up the phone and called our cybersecurity operation and said, ‘we’re getting a denial of service attack from Romania,’” Soderstrom said. “From that it happened to making that call was about five seconds, and they hadn’t even seen it yet.”

He added: “That’s the ability of being able to have all of these IoT devices.”

While Cox noted that the IoT can be a surprising boon to security operations, he acknowledged JPL has to weigh the risk of using connected commercial devices for its operations.

Right now the IoT is only available in the public cloud, Cox noted, not AWS’s Gov Cloud. So Cox said JPL made the decision to not attach devices to its normal network for its mission applications, but to create a separate devices only network.

“We want to be careful about what we’re actually passing through the public cloud,” Cox said.

The laboratory is also experimenting with using commercial connected devices to improve use of its conference rooms and capitalize on its limited space.

“We at JPL support a number of missions and these missions are extremely disparate in the ways that they operate,” Cox said. “A lot of times each mission thinks they need their own hardware, they think they need their own meeting spaces, all that kind of stuff, and historically we have supported that.”

But times are changing, he said.

“We’re getting to a point where we’re taking on more and more, and we need to be able to combine some of these spaces because this operations room sits empty 60 percent of the time and we need to be able to use the people space,” he said.

JPL is in the process of installing Raspberry Pis with motion sensors attached to see what conference rooms are actually being used. That data is being collected where it can be searched and used to get more value out of conference rooms, Cox said.

They have also prototyped using Alexa to help turn equipment on and off and use it to make it easier to set up for presentations.

“Is there really a difference between a connected conference room and a connected living room?” Soderstrom said. “Not really. It’s how you use it and what you try.”

The rapidity with which JPL is able to integrate new, cheap, commercially-available technologies is astounding, Soderstrom said.

“By being able to do these things quickly you get nontraditional partners, so IT is all the sudden a very strong partner with facilities. And before that we hated each other, because we wanted to go fast and they said ‘well I’d have to knock down walls,’” Soderstrom said. “With this all of the sudden you can actually look at the data.”

During a keynote session on Tuesday, Soderstrom also unveiled a NASA-developed Mars skill for Alexa, now available for download.

“This is all about exploring, and getting crowdsourcing and getting people to understand and care about Mars and ask new questions,” Soderstrom said.

It’s a fresh way to connect people to science.

“With this, the idea is we’re all going to be the future explorers,” he said to the crowd of techies.

Contact Samantha via email at samantha.ehlinger@fedscoop.com, or follow her on Twitter at @samehlinger. Subscribe to the Daily Scoop for stories like this in your inbox every morning by signing up here: fdscp.com/sign-me-on.

Trump adds congressional cybersecurity leadership to transition team

Though President-elect Donald Trump has yet to nominate new leaders for the government’s two largest cybersecurity-focused agencies — the departments of Defense and Homeland Security — the recent arrival of three congressional cybersecurity leaders to the transition team may give some indication for how the future commander-in-chief will approach the challenges associated with a hostile cyberspace.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., and Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., were recently added to Trump’s official White House transition team. Each lawmaker has helped steer cybersecurity-related legislation in the 114th Congress.

The appointments come shortly after the Republican president-elect appeared in a video calling for Defense Department and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff “to develop a comprehensive plan to protect America’s vital infrastructure from cyberattacks and all other form of attacks.” Trump included this plan in a list of “executive actions we can take on day one to restore our laws and bring back our jobs.” If pursued, this approach would deviate from the current framework, in which DHS is the primary defender responsible for spotting and stopping cyberattacks aimed at U.S. infrastructure.

Who?

Nunes, a veteran lawmaker who has also been linked to the Director of National Intelligence job, co-sponsored the House version of cyber-information sharing legislation, or CISA, that became law in early 2016. Beyond legislation, the Californian has garnered respect from intelligence, law enforcement and defense officials in the Obama administration.

In the past, Blackburn has rallied against “top-down regulations” in the cyber arena. She sits on the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology. In early 2015, Blackburn co-sponsored a bill that would create basic security and disclosure standards for companies that store consumer data.

Although she has proven to be an influential House member on cybersecurity legislation, Blackburn came under fire in October for what appeared to be a lack of basic knowledge as it pertains to distributed denial of service attacks — an increasingly popular technique hackers use to disrupt online services and properties — during an appearance on CNN.

Marino serves on the House Homeland Security Committee, an especially active congressional body in terms of introducing cybersecurity-related legislation. He previously co-sponsored the Law Enforcement Access to Data Stored Abroad Act. The bill would limit the Justice Department’s ability to access data stored by U.S. multinational corporations.

Three-quarters of DIUx funding under fire in authorization bill

The final version of the annual defense authorization bill is not looking good for the Pentagon startup known as DIUx.

Research, development, test and evaluation funding for the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental will be slashed by 75 percent and operations and maintenance funding by 20 percent until Defense Secretary Ash Carter submits a report to congressional defense committees that addresses some of their concerns, according to the conference report on the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act released this week.

This is not the first time Congress has expressed misgivings with the Pentagon’s pet experiment.

And in May the House Armed Services Committee even proposed in a line item in the bill’s funding tables to zero out the $30 million requested by DOD in the president’s budget plan for fiscal 2017 for the R&D program that houses DIUx.

At the time President Barack Obama threatened a veto of the annual defense policy bill in part because of the provision.

Similar to the version of the bill that emerged from conference, the May version would have also ensured DIUx got no more than 80 percent of any funding authorized until Carter issues a report to Congress.

Carter’s report to Congress would notably need to include how DIUx is coordinating and deconflicting its work with similar activities by the intelligence community venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, defense agencies and agencies across federal government.

The instructions follow one Senate staffer making in October a comment that Congress was still unsure of how DIUx fits in to the innovation acquisition activities already spinning in other agencies, as FedScoop reported at the time.

“The secretary of defense is very fond of going out into the region and saying ‘this is where we’re going to find innovation, this is where we’re going to find new technologies,’ ignoring the fact that to get to San Francisco he flew over all the labs… and ignored all the great work that’s being done sort of in the defense research enterprise,” Senate Armed Services Committee professional staff member Anish Goel said then. “It leaves us thinking: does the secretary of defense actually know what’s going on inside the Department of Defense in terms of research and innovation?”

The conference report also notes that “DIUx’s customer base is not as diverse as expected,” and includes organizations with their own authorities and innovation entities.

“Although the conferees are not opposed to any organization partnering with DIUx, the conferees encourage DIUx to establish relationships with services and other Department of Defense organizations that do not have their own funding, authorities and innovation hubs,” the report reads.

The report also dings the department for not figuring out how to enable DIUx to coexist in the “innovation ecosystem with partners across the Department, finding ways to multiply the effectiveness and networking potential of DIUx by leveraging the personnel, expertise, authorities, and resources of existing successful research, development, innovation, and tech transfer mechanisms.”

The conference report also calls for Carter’s additional information to address justification for any expansion of DIUx, including into new physical locations.

“The conferees remain concerned that in the Department’s rush to try something new, defense leaders have not taken the time to determine how effective recent organizational and management changes are before seeking a rapid expansion of resources,” the report says.

Leadership at the Pentagon’s startup did in fact recently release some analysis on the organization’s effectiveness. DIUx released in October its fourth-quarter report, where it reported awarding 12 agreements totaling $36.3 million.

At the time, when asked where DIUx fits in to the Defense Department, especially given its other innovation initiatives, DIUx Managing Director Raj Shah told reporters the key distinction is that DIUx is “solely focused on leveraging commercial technologies, markets and investments.”

“We are trying to find companies and products where there’s been significant amount of investment from people outside of the department, which allows us to get the capabilities that we need cheaper and more efficiently,” Shah said. “We’re also very much focused on speed.”

He also noted: “We’ve been moving very, very fast, in startup speed over the last 140 days, and so now we’re taking a pause to be able to communicate what we’ve done and why we at the department think it’s valuable.”

The report wasn’t entirely negative toward DIUX — it acknowledges the recent changes DIUx has made, presumably referring to the second iteration of DIUx that included a new organizational structure and new leadership.

“The conferees remain cautiously optimistic that the changes to the organizational structure and functions of DIUx could become important tools for the Department of Defense to engage with new and non-traditional commercial sources of innovation, as well as rapidly identify and integrate new technologies into defense systems,” the report reads.

Here’s how the Defense Digital Service is trying to support veterans’ medical records

Las Vegas — When the Defense Digital Service started working with a contractor to improve the IT supporting veterans’ medical records, the techies were faced with a staggering number of missing documents.

About 20,000 documents — known as service treatment records — had silently failed to move from the Defense Department to the Department of Veterans Affairs, said Defense Digital Service Director Chris Lynch Wednesday at a public sector breakfast at Amazon re:Invent.

While problems around transferring veterans’ medical records are not unknown in the federal space, the public rarely hears how the federal government, and specifically a group like the Defense Digital Service, is trying to fix the problem.

Defense Digital Service discovered records were getting lost after doctors made a seemingly unimportant decision when uploading files: PDF, TIF or JPEG.

“Here’s the thing: there’s only one file format — one — that’s the correct answer: PDF. Because the VA will only accept PDFs,” he said. “What do you think happens to the other documents? They silently disappear.”

The team wrote file converters, and worked on a host of other issues surrounding the system, including that a major software update hadn’t been shipped in 18 months when the digital service team came on the scene.

Defense Digital Services worked with the team to get them into production every two weeks, Lynch said.

“The documents when they disappear — here’s what they are: They’re the document that says, ‘I was exposed to hazardous chemicals and I need chemotherapy for my cancer treatment,’” Lynch said. “I get goosebumps every time I tell that story. That’s why I show up.”

On Wednesday, Lynch also made a pitch to the audience at the breakfast to come join the digital service team.

“I believe deeply that people like you and people like me can show up in government and make a difference,” Lynch said.

As he closed his presentation, Lynch said to the crowd: “The most boring, mundane, everyday part of your skill set that you take for granted is novel, and unique and matters. It matters. I hope that you’ll come join what we’re doing.”

Mary Davie: EIS transition overrun can’t happen

The General Services Administration cannot exceed the three-year window it has set to award contracts under its $50 billion next-gen Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions telecom vehicle and to transition agencies away from the preceding Networx vehicle, the GSA official leading the charge on the new contract said Wednesday.

For a variety of reasons, the last time GSA faced such a monumental transition — moving from the FTS2001 contracts to Networx, beginning in 2007 — it took six years, Mary Davie said at Next-Gen Network Summit produced by FedScoop. GSA will award contracts under EIS, which will account for more than $2 billion in managed federal network services spent each year, sometime in spring 2017.

“We can’t go beyond three [years] this time,” she said. “We have extended the [Networx] contracts on purpose up front this time to give a deadline. We didn’t do that last time and it caused issues.”

“We learned a lot of lessons the last time, and we’re taking this very seriously,” Davie added.

With those lessons in mind, Davie and her GSA team began working with agencies a few years ago, creating transition timeline templates that align with the goal of moving from Networx to EIS in early 2020. Most agencies have completed those timelines. “We’re now working with agencies to make sure they’re as complete as possible,” Davie said.

That’s no little task, however. There’s a lot to boil down before 2020.

“What we’re encouraging agencies to think about is what emerging technologies are available, how would they lower the total cost of ownership, and how do you then include that in transition?” Davie said. “This transition represents not only a lot of risk but also a lot of opportunity. We’ve been encouraging the agencies to really look at how they can modernize their networks, take advantage of new technologies and services, really improve the cybersecurity posture, and, again, continue to achieve significant cost savings.”

It’s also a 15-year contract to consider. “This program’s going to go on through 2032. … We can’t possibly know where we’re going to be in 15 years in the technology world; we all know that,” Davie said. But they’ve built the contract to be flexible, with only four mandatory services. The other services are optional with an area for “emerging technology to take us over those next 15 years.”

“While the contracts are not awarded yet, there’s a lot of work that should be going on with the agencies talking to industry … to figure out what options [they] have to move out of maybe a current legacy environment to something new and different,” she said. That is, agencies should be looking for opportunities to “transform” while they transition, she said.

Plus there are eight million line items to move off of the Networx contracts, Davie explained. And based on agency timelines, it looks like there may be in excess of 100 task order requests to be filed against EIS.

“In the three-year window, if we have the hundred or so task order requests, I’m not sure how we’re all going to be able to support that transition through all of those different things,” she said. “I think it’s important that the agencies sort of stick to what’s been defined at a contract level where we can … not try to customize too much, and look for opportunities to consolidate requirements.”

But Davie said officials have to be “cautiously optimistic” about making the transition a success and keeping it front and center for the next few months until awards are made and changeovers occur — which won’t be easy with another transition creating big distractions in Washington right now.

“We’ve got a big transition happening and this transition happening — a lot of work to be done, a lot of things to focus on,” she said, referring to Donald Trump’s presidential ongoing and relatively chaotic presidential transition. “But we’re going to get through it. … It’s just making sure that it stays high on the radar and in front of people.”

GSA even has another transition on its mind — the one that will inevitably come when EIS expires.

“I thought that was really important, that we start to look at how we do that next time, and then again how to do it differently,” Davie said. “My personal hope is we’ll see agencies taking more and more advantage of things like managed services and software defined networking, the types of things that get us out of owning a lot of stuff and a lot of hardware.”

The key questions will be, “At the end of the day, are you getting services delivered? Are citizens getting what they need form the agencies?” she said. “That would also help smooth and ease transition in the future.”

Senate legislation would codify Presidential Innovation Fellows

Several senators introduced legislation Wednesday that would codify the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which embeds private-sector innovators into federal agencies for a yearlong tour.

Sens. Mark Warner, D-Va., James Lankford, R-Okla., and Cory Booker, D-N.J., introduced the bill to codify the program institutionalized under a 2015 executive order by President Obama. The legislation is considered a companion bill, with some technical changes, to the House’s TALENT Act of 2016, which passed in July.

The goal is to set the project in stone in anticipation of a changing administration.

“This bill creates a permanent pipeline for our nation’s best and brightest to innovate inside government agencies, allowing for an injection of private sector expertise without creating bureaucratic bloat or displacing change-makers within government,” Warner said in a statement. “The contributions of the talented participants of the Presidential Innovation Fellows program will help us build a more efficient, accessible, and accountable government for generations to come.”

Lankford called the bill “commonsense legislation,” and Booker said that making the program permanent will make sure government can keep pace with innovation.

“The Presidential Innovation Fellows program has furnished our nation’s boldest engineers and technologists with a unique opportunity to work with government agencies on providing more innovative and engaging services to the public,” Booker said.

Fellows — known as PIFs — have contributed to major federal technology projects such as the launch of Data.gov, the Police Data Initiative, Blue Button and the RFP-EZ platform.

Several fellows this year also worked on a project with the Commerce Department and the White House’s Council on Women and Girls called Hack the Pay Gap, which was designed to “open up troves of census data at the intersection of income and gender” to encourage citizens to build tools to close the gender pay gap, Smita Satiani, deputy director for the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, told FedScoop in July.

The tools created as a part of the initiative tackled everything from salary negotiation and the cost of goods based on wage inequality to how maternity leave affects the pay disparity.

People shopping online, for example, can use a Google Chrome extension or interactive microsite called Raise Above the Wage to see the cost of an item adjusted for wage inequality.

Through the extension, a user could find that based on median wage, an African-American woman would have to work 42 minutes longer than a white man to afford a $12.50 lunch.

“When you see the quality of the products that were produced I think it really speaks to you know the power of government and citizens collaborating in this way,” said Kyla Fullenwider, a 2016 PIF who worked on the initiative with Satiani.

Many PIFs have stayed on with the federal government after their fellowship ended, taking innovative roles with agencies — many as part of the 18F team at the General Services Administration, which currently houses the Presidential Innovation Fellows program.

The program began accepting applications for its 2017 class last week.

IT modernization bill needs continued push from industry, Rep. Hurd says

With about two weeks before the current Congress closes out for good, many in the federal tech community are wondering how to spur movement in the Senate around the Modernizing Government Technology Act.

To Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas, an author of the House-passed version of the bill, it’s simple. Or perhaps it’s that the options are growing slim.

“Call them,” said Hurd, the chairman of the IT Subcommittee of House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. He was re-elected to his seat in November and will retain the chairmanship next year.

Hurd wants those industry leaders and anyone concerned with the outcome of his bill and federal IT modernization to talk to their senators and the members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs about it.

“For those that already have, thank you. It’s a big deal. The fact that industry shows that this is important and wants to see this happen, that has an impact,” he said Wednesday at a data center optimization event hosted by Schneider Electric. “Talking to those members is important. And I do think we still have a window to pull this off.”

But that window, which ends Dec. 16 when Congress is expected to wrap up work for the year, is becoming alarmingly small.

“The clock is running out,” Hurd said — but he hasn’t completely given up hope. Borrowing a metaphor, “I’ve attached the flag to the pole,” he said. “I’m not raising a red flag, but it’s attached.”

An IT reform bill such as this one, Hurd said, is fairly bipartisan. It would create individual IT working capital funds for each of the 24 CFO Act agencies and a centralized IT modernization fund housed in the Treasury Department that executive branch agencies could apply to draw from and repay in a given time.

If the speed at which the House was able to pass the bill any indication, the Senate could very well pull it off, Hurd said.

“Honestly, it’s a big deal that we were able to pass this [under suspension of the the rules] out of the House,” he said. “That shows the level of work that was done in advance and the cooperation.”

While the bill as it stands doesn’t account for any sort of funding, it does build a model in which agencies can plan in longer cycles for modernization and how to reinvest any savings they incur, moving them away from “the notion of if you don’t use it you lose it,” Hurd said.

Federal systems and networks are “so big that in order to change within a calendar, it is incredibly difficult,” he said. “If you realize savings, it is incredibly difficult to utilize that savings within the same calendar year. So why not put in a working capital fund for three years so you have access to it?”

U.S. CIO Tony Scott is a major proponent of the bill and agencies’ ability to not only modernize in the short term but also to continue to do so in regular cycles. Any savings or money paid back to the central fund “can be used to fund the next set of initiatives, which is important as well,” he said.

Scott, who also spoke at the data center event Wednesday, described how this sort of modernization — if managed right and done well — can make it so agencies can “reinvest in a way that you don’t ever have to ask for a budget increase.”

“In my experience, if you get on this flywheel of continuous upgrade and continuous reinvestment, it actually costs you less, and you’re more efficient, more effective and more responsive to your customers needs,” he said. “And this is true across infrastructure, applications, the whole space. That’s why we’ve got to get on this. That’s why it’s urgent.”

These senators are hoping to divide Cyber Command from the NSA

This report first appeared on CyberScoop.

A bipartisan amendment introduced Tuesday in the Senate to the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act seeks to elevate U.S. Cyber Command to a combatant command. The status upgrade would cause Cyber Command to become independent of the NSA, receive additional resources and assume different leadership than currently installed.

The inclusion mirrors that of an amendment included in the House’s version of the long-overdue NDAA, which attracted subsequent criticism from the White House. The Obama administration claimed that the authority to establish unified combatant commands rests solely in the executive branch. The House passed its version of the NDAA, a bill that authorizes a wide array of defense spending, in April.

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., announced the inclusion of the amendment in the bill during a Senate floor speech on how the U.S. must counter the Islamic State’s growing technological capabilities.

“The elevation of CYBERCOM will ensure that we are always one step ahead of the enemies who seek to destroy us and our way of life,” Daines said. “As radical Islamic extremists continue to recruit online, it is imperative now more than ever that CYBERCOM has the tools to react quickly and defeat the enemy.”

Daines’ amendment comes with support from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and seven other senators, including Mark Warner, D-Va., who is expected to become vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee next year. McCain had previously voiced concerns about dividing Cyber Command from its Fort Meade neighbor via executive order. In early September, McCain had said he would block any potential move by the Obama administration to separate Cyber Command from the NSA.

Those comments followed shortly after an NBC News report on national television noting support by Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper for a White House plan to elevate Cyber Command in the waning months of the current administration. “I do not believe rushing to separate the ‘dual hat’ in the final months of an administration is appropriate, given the very serious challenges we face in cyberspace,” McCain said, referencing the shared leadership structure employed between the two organizations.

CyberScoop has reached out to McCain’s office about the senator’s support for Daines’ amendment.

President Obama’s top cybersecurity adviser, Michael Daniel, left the door open for major changes to occur at Cyber Command before November’s presidential election in an interview with CyberScoop in August. At the time, Daniel said, “we are constantly reviewing if we have the appropriate organizational structures in place to counter evolving threats, in cyberspace or elsewhere.”

If Cyber Command were to become a unified combatant command, it would operate on equal footing with the likes of U.S. Strategic Command, giving it an increased budget and elevated operational authority to conduct missions globally. At command’s headquarters in Fort Meade, the operational shift has long been expected; the remaining question is simply about timing.

Booz Allen Hamilton buys Acquilent for $250M

Booz Allen Hamilton will acquire agile web development firm and cloud service provider Aquilent for $250 million to boost its digital contracting offerings for federal agencies.

The acquisition will enhance Booz Allen’s “growing technology capabilities and talent base, particularly its emphasis on building citizen-focused digital services,” the company said in a release. The company hopes to close the deal by the end of calendar year 2016, adding up to $35 million in revenue to its bottom line for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends March 31, 2017.

“Aquilent builds on Booz Allen’s existing digital capabilities, bringing greater expertise to deliver the digital services that citizens expect the Federal government to provide in a modern, 24/7 environment,” Greg Wenzel, executive vice president for Booz Allen’s digital business, said in a written statement. “This acquisition expands our network of digital solutions offerings with a team of technologists and a modern facility where we can advance cutting-edge solutions for our clients and take advantage of growth opportunities in the market for large digital projects.”

Aquilent’s current business will now operate in its current Laurel, Maryland, location as an arm of Booz Allen Digital’s business. The 350-employee company has provided digital and cloud services to the U.S. Postal Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, the General Services Administration and a variety of other federal clients.

“Joining a firm like Booz Allen, which aligns so closely with our expertise, offers the chance to expand into new areas of digital work, expands capabilities for our clients through the breadth of their relationships, and is a great opportunity for the people of Aquilent,” CEO David Fout said. “We look forward to working together to support existing and future clients.”