(CyberScoop) Seven months into Joe Biden’s presidency, an administration confronting several cybersecurity crises finally has a permanent director en route to take over one of the top few cyber posts in the federal government.

The Senate on Monday confirmed Jen Easterly as director of the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency by voice vote.

Once she’s sworn in, Easterly — the departing head of Morgan Stanley’s Fusion Resilience Center and a former White House and National Security Agency official — will be busy with the aftermath of a spree of ransomware attacks that have attracted the attention of policymakers like none before. They include incidents at fuel supplier Colonial Pipeline, meat processor JBS and software company Kaseya, where a compromise opened the door for attackers to claim perhaps thousands of victims.

(Nextgov) Democrats and Republicans on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security expressed concerns in a hearing Tuesday on the increased use of facial recognition by the federal government and law enforcement.

(Nextgov) Defense Department officials ended its long, strange attempt to buy a single enterprise cloud by canceling the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract July 6 after years of legal challenges, Congressional inquiries and other delays that kept the project from ever getting off the ground.

But it surprised few in the government contracting community that JEDI’s days were numbered. Even when JEDI was conceived in 2017, few enterprises were locking into single cloud solutions, and some experts argue that JEDI was dead—or close to dead—on arrival.

“It struck me that at the time … that maybe this … was overcome by events,” Stan Soloway, chief executive of Celero Strategies and a former DOD acquisition official, said in an interview with Nextgov. 

(Nextgov) Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin teased a new vision for deterring adversaries and announced a $1.5 billion commitment to the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence hub over the next five years. 

At a summit event Tuesday hosted by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, which released its final report last March that found the U.S. is unprepared for AI competition with China, Austin said preventing conflict requires a new vision. That vision, he said, is called integrated deterrence. 

(Cision PR Newswire) Intelligent Innovations Group (IIG), a joint venture created between Argus Secure Technology LLC and Aveshka, Inc., has won a position supporting the $12.6 billion Solutions for Information Technology Enterprise III (SITE III) Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).

(Cision PR Newswire) Aveshka, a trusted provider of data analytics capabilities and subject matter expertise in the public health realm, was recently awarded a subcontract with the Data, Analytics, and Visualization Task Force (DAVTF) of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Aveshka is serving as a subcontractor to Booz Allen Hamilton on this program.

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