Dan Davidson reports on a VA cybersecurity initiative that will help protect veterans’ health data by using a tool to determine whether the devices are using required security tools:
… so far, VA has almost 30,000 laptops tracked by the tool, he said.
[…]
“The Visibility to Desktop Initiation is the ability to, at any given time, look at the status of all 333,000 machines in the network from a central location.” Davis said. “This includes the hardware, software, patch level, level of security compliance, and membership of the administrative group. Full visibility will enable us to see what is out there on our networks, identify problems and risks, and provide the field with resources needed to tackle emerging issues.”
Within the next 12 months, VA will expand the tool to all devices on its network — things like BlackBerrys and thumb drives. “That will put us on a par with the best-managed private-sector organizations,” Davis said.
Interestingly, the VA stats mentioned in the article confirm what I suggested earlier today: that despite what Microsoft is reporting about breaches causing data loss being down significantly relative to last year, reports of incidents — with or without actual data compromise or loss — are up.
Read more on Federal Times.