DHS Testing Employee Phishing Smarts

Morning Coffee is a robust blend of links to news around the internet concerning the Naval Air Station Patuxent River economic community. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of the Leader’s owners or staff.

The Department of Homeland Security’s chief information office sends emails that mimic phishing attempts to his staff to see how savvy they are about cyber security. Employees who fail Paul Beckman’s test — by clicking on potentially unsafe links and inputting usernames and passwords — are forced to undergo mandatory online security training, DefenseOne reports. Security clearances of repeat offenders could be at risk, the report says.

In a shift in the involvement of world powers in the four-year-old Syrian conflict, the United States and Russia agreed Friday to consider potential areas of military cooperation there, reports McClatchy DC. The agreement to hold military-to-military talks in parallel with diplomatic consultations was reached in a telephone conversation Friday between U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter and his Russian counterpart, Sergei Shoygu.

The pace of hacking by Chinese-government supported actors appears to have slowed in recent months, in anticipation of tough talk by the U.S. on cybersecurity during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington this week, Fortune reports.

Writing in Politico, a 40-year veteran of federal budgeting who has served on both the House and Senate budget committees sees the odds of a government shutdown increasing when the next fiscal year begins at midnight Sept. 30. Stan Collender puts the chances at 75 percent.

Secretary of State John Kerry says the U.S. will boost the number of refugees it will take in by 30,000 over two years, admitting 85,000 in fiscal 2016 and 100,000 in fiscal 2017, the Wall Street Journal reports.

NASA has announced that it successfully tested a prototype system that allows unpiloted drones to detect and avoid other aircraft in their midst. The agency’s Ikhana autonomous drones were able to sense when something was in their flightpath and make adjustments on their own, NextGov reports.

F-22 procurement quantities have been slashed repeatedly, going from 750 to 339, with production finally being capped at just 195 aircraft. Gen. Herbert “Hawk” Carlisle, head of the U.S. Air Combat Comand, calls this the “biggest mistake ever,” FlightGlobal reports.

NAWCAD physicist Frank Narducci is participating in the DC I-Corps Fed Tech Lab Program, a rigorous initiative designed to help research labs commercialize their technologies. On Sept. 19, Narducci began working with University of Maryland graduate students as well as entrepreneurial mentors to conduct market research and explore the potential of his invention, a gradient magnetometer that isolates a signal of interest from background magnetic noise, in hopes that there is commercial demand for the tool.

Operations began last Friday at the largest training bombing area in the continental U.S., reports the Associated Press. The Powder River Training Complex over the Dakotas, Montana and Wyoming has been expanded to nearly 35,000 square miles and will be used primarily by aircraft from Minot and Ellsworth Air Force bases.

The long-discussed third building at the Southern Maryland Higher Education Center has received a key approval from the Maryland Department of Budget Management to move ahead toward design. The total price tag is $78.7 million, but there is a gap in funding for the project in the state budget, The Enterprise reports. There is $2.5 million in prior authorization and another $3.25 million in fiscal 2018. But nothing is shown in the current fiscal year budget, or in 2017, although there is $65 million total budgeted between fiscal 2019 and 2020.