U.S. agencies vow closer scrutiny of China-funded learning centres

Reuters | March 01, 2019

U.S. agencies on Thursday promised stricter monitoring of China-funded Confucius Institutes, cultural centres at U.S. universities that have been criticized for serving as propaganda arms of the Communist government in Beijing. Officials from the Departments of State and Education told a Senate hearing they would more closely police visas granted to the institutes’ staff and do more to ensure that schools meet requirements to report large donations from foreign governments.

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EMERGING TECHNOLOGY, INFRASTRUCTURE

Nyriad and Carahsoft Partner to Enable Government Agencies and Academic Institutions to Optimize, Modernize, and Accelerate Digital Transformation

Businesswire | May 10, 2023

Nyriad®, provider of cutting edge GPU storage technology, and Carahsoft Technology Corp., The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, today announced a partnership. Under the agreement, Carahsoft will serve as Nyriad’s Master Government Aggregator®, making the company’s UltraIO™ storage system available to the Public Sector through Carahsoft’s reseller partners, NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) V, Information Technology Enterprise Solutions – Software 2 (ITES-SW2), National Cooperative Purchasing Alliance (NCPA), and OMNIA Partners contracts. In 2022, the global Government IT spending amounted to over 551 billion U.S. dollars, which is an increase of nine percent compared to 2021, and it is expected to increase even more in 2023 to 589 billion U.S. dollars worldwide. The increase in IT spending is driven by a variety of factors, including the need to modernize outdated systems, improve cybersecurity, and enhance digital services and capabilities for internal and external users. As IT spending in the government sector continues to grow, there is a critical need for modern and efficient storage solutions that can meet the demands of data-intensive applications, protect against cyber threats, and facilitate the digital transformation of government services. The Nyriad UltraIO storage system delivers the ideal solution to address these needs and enable government agencies to improve their operations and services. The Nyriad UltraIO storage system will enable improved capabilities across several use cases, such as: High-performance computing (HPC) - Government agencies and academic institutions rely on high-performance computing to perform complex simulations, modeling, and analysis. The UltraIO storage system enables performant, cost efficient storage access, and ingest for large capacity points of HPC results inside of a single array. Additionally, with block-level erasure codes, the storage system provides a high degree of system resiliency, ensuring data integrity and protection against potential data loss. Backup and recovery - Government agencies and academic institutions must be prepared for unexpected events, such as natural disasters or cyberattacks, that can result in data loss. The UltraIO storage system’s combined GPU + CPU architecture enables parallel read and write capabilities to perform backup and restore operations with exceptional performance. Active archive - Government agencies and academic institutions archive their data to preserve records for historical, legal, and regulatory purposes. This data may include records of legislative proceedings, court cases, financial transactions, and other important documents. As data sets grow, the value of the analytical insights the data provides has grown as well. We access the data, looking for trends and insights that can be advantageous for good decision making. Enhanced data access beyond normal archival capabilities is needed for this. With its high throughput, fast retrieval, and high data protection capabilities, the UltraIO storage solution is the next architectural step for implementing an active archive. This is cost efficient storage that allows performant access to warm tier archive data. Video and imaging - Government agencies and academic institutions produce and store large amounts of media content, such as videos, images, and audio files. Because these agencies use video surveillance systems as a security measure to monitor public areas, protect critical infrastructure, and ensure public safety, a storage system with fast data ingest and playback capabilities or analytics processing is an essential enabler of quick incident response. In fact, the Nyriad UltraIO storage system can ingest video streams from as many as 90,000 cameras simultaneously, while providing highly resilient large-scale storage capacity. The UltraIO storage system’s modern, GPU-accelerated storage also facilitates video production tasks such as 8K resolution or higher video editing without the need to transcode, create proxies, or copy files across the network – enabling agencies to work more efficiently, saving time and money. “Partnering with Nyriad supports our mission to simplify the technology procurement process and position our channel partners for success with the most innovative and disruptive technologies,” said Michael Adams, Director of Carahsoft's AI/ML Solutions Portfolio. “We look forward to delivering Nyriad’s UltraIO data storage system to joint customers through our reseller partners to accelerate and transform agencies’ IT, leading to faster and more powerful business outcomes.” "The strategic partnership with Carahsoft is a key milestone for Nyriad's channel strategy, allowing us to extend our reach and deliver the exceptional performance, resilience, and efficiency benefits of our UltraIO solution to a wider range of government agencies and academic institutions," said Andrew Russell, CRO, Nyriad. "This partnership not only expands our market presence but also underscores our commitment to providing reliable and innovative storage solutions that can help accelerate digital transformation for our customers." About Carahsoft Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider®, supporting Public Sector organizations across Federal, State and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator® for our vendor partners, we deliver solutions for Cybersecurity, MultiCloud, DevSecOps, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Open Source, Customer Experience and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators and consultants, our sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services and training through hundreds of contract vehicles. Visit us at www.carahsoft.com. About Nyriad Nyriad® has unleashed the power and speed of GPUs combined with CPUs to revolutionize how data is stored, accessed and managed. Nyriad’s UltraIO™ software-defined data storage system enables massive amounts of data to be safely and intelligently managed by a single storage platform with a low TCO, while delivering exceptional performance, resiliency and efficiency. With Nyriad, organizations can enhance agility, accelerate innovation and gain the competitive advantage necessary to drive business growth and success. To learn more, please visit: https://www.nyriad.io/.

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EMERGING TECHNOLOGY, CYBERSECURITY

Cynamics, Pioneer of Sample-based Network Detection and Response, Partners with Merlin Cyber to Meet Increasing Demand from US Federal Government

Prnewswire | April 20, 2023

Cynamics, the AI-driven cybersecurity company, is partnering with Merlin Cyber to bring its novel, sample-based network detection and response (NDR) solution to the rapidly expanding US federal government market. A new subsidiary launched with Merlin, Cynamics Federal, will be wholly dedicated to bringing this NDR solution to the federal market, helping US government agencies safeguard critical and sensitive information from ever-growing threats. Working closely with US government agencies, Cynamics last month identified a new range of critical vulnerabilities within current protection layers. These findings, along with Cynamics' state-of-the-art proven NDR technologies, will be showcased at the RSA conference on April 24-27 in San Francisco. "Cynamics has already been working closely with government agencies across the US, and we are excited to introduce our low-touch, built-for-scale NDR solution to the federal government in cooperation with Merlin Cyber," said Eyal Elyashiv, CEO and Founder of Cynamics. Analogous to the accuracy of taking a blood sample, Cynamics' cloud-based solution collects less than 1% of network flow samples and uses its AI technologies to provide 100% network coverage and threat prediction for any network size and environment. Recently, Gartner highlighted Cynamics as an NDR "emerging vendor" leveraging packet sampling as a new data-collection approach. This unique method discovers network blind spots, exposes potential backdoors, identifies anomalous behavior, and enables quick and straightforward remediation. According to Elyashiv, no other solution currently has this capability while being built-to-scale for the US federal government and the largest and most complicated networks in the world. The solution is deployed in a frictionless way within minutes, without installing a single appliance or agent, and begins to deliver valuable insights within hours from onboarding, using only network metadata and without collecting, processing, or analyzing any sensitive or private information, which is a key advantage for the federal audience. This vastly reduces supply chain vulnerabilities. Cynamics has hundreds of clients across the public and private sectors, of different domains, sizes, and geographies. Deep cyber expertise is not required to use and manage the solution, which makes the technology easier for government agencies to deploy. Casting light on a little-known vulnerability, Elyashiv said that the fact that legacy mDNS (multicast DNS) and LLMNR (Link-Local Multicast Name Resolution) are used to resolve hostnames to IP addresses, by sending highly vulnerable multicast messages across local networks, enabled sophisticated attackers to map out the networks and infect them more effectively. "Cynamics' solution offers state-of-the-art protection quickly and with surgical precision for the most valuable assets in our network," said Jad Al-Bijaly, Information Technology and Cybersecurity Manager for Guilford County, North Carolina, a trusted Cynamics customer. Other customers include the cities of Rocky Mount, Urbandale, Saratoga Springs, and others. According to Gartner, in 2022, "the industries with the most interest in NDR continued to be the government and finance industries." Having generated more than $4 billion in contracts to date, Merlin Cyber partners with industry-recognized companies as well as startups, seeing them through all stages of their development and go-to-market execution. Merlin Ventures, the investment arm of Merlin Group, invests most of its capital in startups from Israel, a global hub of innovation in the cybersecurity sector, accelerating them from seed to scale. "The partnership with Cynamics reflects Merlin's commitment to providing a gateway for the most promising global cybersecurity startups to help protect America's critical digital infrastructure," said Seth Spergel, Managing Partner of Merlin Ventures. "We've been tracking the success of Cynamics and are proud to join as both an investor and a partner in helping to bring their solutions to market. Their AI-based network detection and response solution is unique and ideal for how large government networks are architected." About Merlin Cyber Merlin Cyber is the go-to-market arm of Merlin Group, a powerful ecosystem of cybersecurity investment, technical expertise, and partner growth acceleration with 25 years of experience working with the US government. Through Merlin Cyber, federal civilian, defense, state, local and education customers access innovative, public sector-ready cybersecurity solutions that meet government requirements and mission priorities. Merlin does this by selectively partnering with best-in-class cybersecurity brands, investing in visionary emerging technologies, accelerating partner growth, and enabling the US government to successfully keep ahead of today's critical threats, accelerate modernization initiatives, and defend our nation. Learn more at merlincyber.com About Cynamics Cynamics is the only Next Generation (NG) Cloud Network Detection and Response (NDR) solution on the market today using standard sampling protocols built-in to every gateway, patented algorithms, as well as AI and Machine Learning, to provide threat prediction and visibility at speed and scale. Built to protect networks of all sizes and complexity, its highly scalable approach discovers threats missed by competitors and provides clients and partners with an elite defense against cyberattacks, with little-to-no burden on their resources. To learn more visit: https://www.cynamics.ai/

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EMERGING TECHNOLOGY, CYBERSECURITY

Armis Achieves U.S. Department of Defense Impact Level 4 Authorization

Prnewswire | April 03, 2023

Armis, the leading asset visibility and security company, today announced that it has achieved U.S. DoD Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) authorization to operate (ATO) at Impact Level 4 (IL4). This authorization signifies that Armis has met the DoD's strict requirements for the government's sensitive Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI). DoD customers can now take advantage of Armis's secure, agentless, Unified Asset Management for IT, OT and IoT devices. The IL4 ATO is part of continued public sector momentum for Armis, following the achievement of a FedRAMP Moderate Authority to Operate (ATO) in January of this year. These dual votes of confidence mean that any civilian and DoD agency can now take advantage of the most comprehensive AVM platform available. "There is no more important group of organizations that needs complete situational awareness of their network environment than those who defend our nation," said Brian Gumbel, President of Armis. "Our platform discovers, aggregates and correlates all asset information into a single source of truth and identifies vulnerabilities to mitigate risks. Armis will now be able to help DoD meet the challenges of a perimeter-less world and an ever-evolving cyber threat landscape." Many public sector organizations experience a "visibility gap" where IT and security leaders can't see all the vulnerable assets within their environment. You can't protect what you can't see, and the DoD can no longer depend on conventional perimeter-based or identity-based defenses alone to protect critical systems and government data. Accelerating migration to the cloud, the convergence of IT/OT/IoT and increases in near-peer adversary capabilities have changed how the DoD must approach cybersecurity. Armis automatically generates a complete inventory of devices in your enterprise environment - on or off the network. The breadth, depth, and accuracy of the Armis asset inventory and device discovery exceeds that of other products available today. Agencies say they see 50% to 70% more connected devices using Armis technology, giving them the situational awareness they need to protect their networks. Many security frameworks, such as the NIST SP 1800-35A on implementing a Zero Trust Framework, start with inventory. Being aware that assets exist is a prerequisite for cybersecurity but isn't enough. DoD IT leaders need to know whether devices are risky. After discovering and classifying each asset, Armis calculates its risk score. This risk score helps security teams take proactive steps to reduce their attack surface and meet compliance and regulatory frameworks that require agencies to identify and prioritize vulnerabilities. The score is based on multiple risk factors including software vulnerabilities, known attack patterns, connection security, and the observed behavior of each device. "This new IL4 authorization is testament to Armis's commitment to supporting the U.S. Federal government. We are honored to be a trusted partner in helping agencies adjust to an increasingly dangerous cyber environment," continued Gumbel. Armis helps to see and secure some of the largest U.S states and government departments in the world protecting federal, state and local entities from cyber criminals, rogue nations and other bad actors. It also secures critical infrastructure at some of the largest airports, ports and healthcare delivery organizations around the world.Companies trust Armis' real-time and continuous protection to see with full context all managed, unmanaged assets across IT, cloud, IoT devices, medical devices (IoMT), operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS) and 5G. About Armis Armis, the leading asset visibility and security company, provides the industry's first unified asset intelligence platform designed to address the new extended attack surface that connected assets create. Fortune 100 companies trust our real-time and continuous protection to see with full context all managed, unmanaged assets across IT, cloud, IoT devices, medical devices (IoMT), operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS), and 5G. Armis provides passive cyber asset management, risk management, and automated enforcement. Armis is a privately held company and headquartered in California.

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