Page 41 - FCW, November/December 2021

added that the program is just the latest development in the School of Cybersecu- rity’s upward trajectory from enrolling 11 students when it opened in 2015 to now serving nearly 1,000 students.
The ultimate goal of the program is to help support DOD’s mission and its contractors by providing the staff expertise necessary to secure the defense industrial base.
Cybersecurity War Room in the 2020 Election Cycle Maricopa County Office of Enterprise Technology
As disinformation spread during the 2020 election cycle, one of the largest counties in Arizona, a key battleground state, decided to fight back by forming a cybersecurity war room.
The Maricopa County Office of Enterprise Technology made the move to address the increasingly challenging threat vectors, with nefarious domestic actors and nation-states using social media to coordinate both cyber and physical events.
The war room’s leaders took a methodical approach to address- ing cyberthreats ahead of the election and achieved signifi- cant results. An information
The team thwarted several cyber incidents, including a data-scraping attack against a nonvoting system.
security operations team identified and investigated misinformation and disin- formation across a vast web of digital platforms to disrupt attacks targeted at county information systems.
The team thwarted several cyber incidents, including a data-scraping attack against a nonvoting system that led to the arrest of an Arizona resident and a possible nation-state attacker’s attempt to register thou- sands of fake accounts on a popular civic engagement website. The team also responded to a distributed denial- of-service attack against a county web- site used to identify polling locations and uncovered disinformation that did not originate in the U.S.
To bolster the effectiveness of their efforts, war room officials created channels of communication and estab- lished processes with the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the
FBI and the state’s Counter Terrorism Information Center, Department of Public Safety and secretary of state.
By the time Arizona voters headed to the polls, the war room was ready to provide hourly updates on election activities to its partners and real-time intelligence on potential attacks and evolving threats to ensure that Mari- copa County’s election, and that of the country, was secure.
Defense SBIR/STTR Innovation Portal Defense Department
Lawmakers and defense officials often tout small businesses as the key to inno- vation. But connecting small companies with the nearly $1 billion in funds the Defense Department awards each year is often difficult and complex — even down to the application process. A new approach under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs aims to transform how those companies interact with DOD.
Small businesses are often on the frontlines of economic development and job growth, and their performance was tested when the pandemic and health safety mandates affected their
rising star
Travis S. Kelley
CIO, Infrastructure and Operations Division Defense Health Agency
Travis Kelley ensures the health of the networks and systems that military medi-
cal providers and their patients rely on. During the pandemic, he helped develop methodologies to support the surge in employ- ees who were working from home. He played a pivotal role in provisioning hundreds of laptops and telework-ready phones within 48 hours for the Global Network Operations Center, a
helpdeskthatsupports1,200militaryhospitals,clinicsandtreat- ment facilities.
Kelly Godsey, the Defense Health Agency’s chief operating officer, said Kelley often stayed up all night configuring laptops for distribution to employees. Godsey added that Kelley’s advanced education in health care management and IT made him uniquely qualified “to think more strategically, especially for somebody at his grade level,” and collaborate with industry part- ners and state officials in Texas, Georgia and Virginia to execute missions during the pandemic.
“He really operated at the strategic level,” Godsey said. “He operated in a [public relations] role, getting other people to provide us the information that we needed. I’m not sure the pro- gram would have been even remotely as successful without his input and his ability to keep everything charging forward.”
November/December 2021 FCW.COM 41