GovConJudicata Weekly Debrief (1/10–14)
This week's Weekly Debrief covers CMMC 2.0, FBI's cybercrime shift, the Army's cloud initiative, Navy and emerging tech, alarm bells on DoD spending, and contractor jailed for $346 million small business fraud.
Cyber
"For the past several months, there has been a frantic scrambling by all stakeholders involved in the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program — the Accreditation Body (AB), the Defense Department, the third-party assessment organizations (C3PAO) and defense industrial base (DIB) vendors — to determine the best path forward to secure the nation’s supply chain. This was CMMC’s implicit goal from the beginning. The problem was that the program was never really thought through. It wasn’t clear how to implement the requirements, the requirements themselves kept changing, and bottlenecks constantly popped up toward implementing what did seem to be settled."
"In 2022, the FBI is looking to approach cybercrime differently. During separate public appearances on Thursday, two FBI officials said the bureau was going to change up how it deals with computer intrusions."
Defense
"Bringing new cloud and data capabilities to the tactical edge is a top priority for the U.S. Army this fiscal year, according to the service’s chief information officer. Following the release of its digital transformation strategy last fall, the Army plans to start building out a variety of efforts to catapult the service into a digital native organization."
"The Navy’s top admiral wants to push his service to be better in 2022 after what he described as repeated failures to respond to key challenges, including the adoption of emerging technologies, he said Tuesday."
"The recent passage of the 2022 National Defense Authorization Act showed overwhelming bipartisan agreement that the Pentagon needs more money. But military leaders are sounding alarm bells as the defense appropriations bill remains stalled amid larger budget fights and support grows for the notion of freezing the rest of the year’s defense spending at last year’s levels."
Contractor Fraud
"A construction company owner who is neither a veteran nor a minority has been sentenced to 28 months in prison for defrauding the government out of $346 million in contracts meant for service-disabled veterans and minorities. Matthew C. McPherson, 45, of Olathe, Kansas, was also ordered to pay the government back $5.5 million, which was his share of profits from the scheme, the Justice Department said in a news release."
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