Congressional commission wants more cyberwarriors for the military

By: Mark Pomerleau   January 7

The U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission, a bipartisan organization created in 2019 to develop a multipronged U.S. cyber strategy, will recommend the Department of Defense add more cyberwarriors to its forces, the group’s co-chair said Jan. 7.

The cyber mission force was established in 2013 and includes 133 teams and roughly 6,200 individuals from across the services that feed up to U.S. Cyber Command. These forces reached a staffing milestone known as full operational capability in May 2018, however, some on the commission believe the cyber landscape has changed so that the force needs to adapt as well.

In a final report that’s expected in the coming months, the solarium will recommend adding more cyberwarriors.

“It’s fair to say that force posture today in cyber is probably not adequate," said Rep. Mike Gallagher, R-Wisc., co-chair of the U.S. Cyberspace Solarium Commission. Gallagher spoke at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington Jan. 7.

Within the last two years, Cyber Command has described a philosophy called persistent engagement, which is a means of constantly contesting adversary behavior in cyberspace before it can be disruptive. Persistent engagement is viewed as a means of meeting the 2018 DoD cyberspace strategy’s direction to “defend forward.” That action seeks to position U.S. cyber forces outside of U.S. networks to either take action against observed adversary behavior or warn partners domestically or internationally of impending cyber activity observed in foreign networks.

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https://www.defensenews.com/dod/2020/01/07/congressional-commission-wants-more-cyberwarriors-for-the-military/

2020 outlook for cybersecurity legislation

Here's a rundown of all the security-related bills working their way through this year's U.S. Congress, plus some hot security topics likely to be debated.

As the partisan divide in Washington widens during this 116th Congress, the prospects of enacting any meaningful legislation that bolsters the nation’s cybersecurity seem, at first blush, dim. Of the nearly 300 pieces of legislation that touch on some aspect of cybersecurity, or more urgently, election security, introduced since the current Congress began last year, only nine have become law. Most were budget-related measures that appropriated or increased funds for federal agencies to spend on cybersecurity or election security as part of the fiscal 2020 spending deal passed in December.

Now, roughly halfway through the current Congress, it’s time to take stock and review where things stand in the legislative arena. A number of bills have been passed by either the House or the Senate and are awaiting further action. They are worth watching in 2020 because they have progressed the farthest and arguably might come closest to gaining some momentum toward passage.

House-passed cybersecurity legislation

Notable pieces of digital security-related bills that the House has passed include:

R. 3710 - Cybersecurity Vulnerability Remediation Act: This bill was passed by the House in September and is now before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which has taken no action yet. The bill would allow the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS’s) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to issue protocols to mitigate vulnerabilities, and would allow the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security to establish an incentive program that allows industry, individuals, academia, and others to compete in providing remediation solutions for cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

R.2331 - SBA Cyber Awareness Act and H.R.1649 - Small Business Development Center Cyber Training Act of 2019: Both bills passed the House on July 15. The SBA Cyber Awareness Act addresses the cybersecurity of the Small Business Administration (SBA). It requires the SBA to report annually to Congress on SBA’s IT technology and any necessary improvements the agency’s technology infrastructure may need. It also requires SBA to provide an account of its IT equipment or interconnected system or subsystem of equipment manufactured by an entity that has its principal place of business in the People's Republic of China.

The annual report must further provide accounts of any cybersecurity incident SBA has encountered during the previous two years and how the government agency dealt with the incidents. The Small Business Development Center Cyber Training Act requires the SBA to establish a program for certifying that at least 5% or 10% of the total number of employees of a small business development center provide cybersecurity planning assistance to small businesses. Both bills have companion legislation in the Senate sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) who chairs the Senate Small Business Committee and are awaiting votes by the full Senate.

R. 328 - Hack Your State Department Act: This bill was one of the first cybersecurity measures passed by the House during the 116th Congress, enacted last January and quickly referred to the Senate where companion legislation was introduced on June 12. It requires the “Secretary of State to design and establish a Vulnerability Disclosure Process (VDP) to improve Department of State cybersecurity” and mandates a bug bounty program “to identify and report vulnerabilities of internet-facing information technology of the Department of State.”

R. 1 - For the People Act of 2019: The first bill introduced in the new Congress was passed by the House on March 8. Among other things, this sweeping piece of legislation “sets forth provisions related to election security, including sharing intelligence information with state election officials, protecting the security of the voter rolls, supporting states in securing their election systems, developing a national strategy to protect the security and integrity of U.S. democratic institutions, establishing in the legislative branch the National Commission to Protect United States Democratic Institutions.”

A companion bill in the Senate, S 949, was introduced in March. Of all the cybersecurity-related bills passed by the House, H.R. 1 is least likely to gain momentum in the Senate given stiff resistance by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has vowed to never bring what he perceives as overly progressive legislation to the Senate floor.

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https://www.csoonline.com/article/3512043/2020-outlook-for-cybersecurity-legislation.html

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Solid Vaccine Eliminates Acute Myeloid Leukemia In Mice

January 15, 2020

Solid vaccine eliminates acute myeloid leukemia in mice

Acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is a deadly blood cancer that originates in the bone marrow and kills most of its victims within five years. Chemotherapy has been the standard AML treatment for over 40 years, and while it often causes the cancer to go into remission, it rarely completely eliminates the cancerous cells, which then lead to disease recurrence in nearly half of treated patients. Aggressive post-remission treatments, like high-dose chemotherapy or bone marrow transplants, can reduce the chance of recurrence, but many AML patients are not healthy enough to tolerate them.

Now, a new study presents an alternative treatment that has the potential to eliminate AML cells completely: an injectable, biomaterial-based vaccine that, when combined with standard chemotherapy, caused complete and lasting recovery from and immunity against AML in mice. The study was conducted by researchers from Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and Stem Cell Institute (SCI), and is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.

“We have previously developed cancer vaccines against solid tumors, and we were curious to see if this technology would also be effective at treating a blood cancer like AML,” said co-first author Nisarg Shah, a former postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Wyss core faculty member David Mooney, who is now an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego. “The promising outcomes of the combination of this vaccine with chemotherapy may translate to human vaccines that can be personalized yet offer off-the-shelf convenience.”

A crafty cryogel

Like other vaccines, the AML vaccine “teaches” the body’s immune system to recognize a foreign invader (in this case, AML cancer cells) so that it can mount an effective attack when that invader appears. While traditional vaccines are typically liquid, this vaccine is a tiny, disk-shaped “cryogel” scaffold made primarily of two materials – polyethylene glycol and alginate – that have been cross-linked together to form a matrix. Two biomolecules (GM-CSF and CpG-ODN) are embedded in the scaffold to attract the body’s dendritic cells and activate them, along with antigens specific to AML cells (either contents from dead AML cells or a peptide from the protein WT-1 that AML cells express on their surface). The activated dendritic cells take up the antigens from the vaccine site and present them to T cells, triggering them to seek and destroy AML cells and, hopefully, patrol the body long-term to destroy any disease recurrence.

To test whether their cryogel vaccine effectively primed the immune system to attack AML cells, the team injected it under the skin of healthy mice, and saw that it resulted in a much higher number of activated T cells when either AML cell contents or WT-1 peptide was used as the antigen, compared with mice that received the activating biomolecules via a traditional vaccine injection or a “blank” scaffold without any biomolecules. They then “challenged” the mice by injecting them with WT-1-expressing AML cells to mimic the initial onset of the disease. The mice that received either the traditional vaccine or a blank scaffold succumbed to the disease within 60 days, while those that received the cryogel vaccine survived. The survivors were then re-challenged with a second dose of AML cells after 100 days and displayed no signs of disease, demonstrating that the vaccine successfully protected them against recurrence.

“The promising outcomes of the combination of this vaccine with chemotherapy may translate to human vaccines that can be personalized yet offer off-the-shelf convenience.”

— David Mooney

Because AML originates in the bone marrow and cancerous cells can “hide” there to escape chemotherapy treatment, the team analyzed the mice’s bone marrow. They found large numbers of active T cells and no trace of AML cells in the cryogel-vaccinated mice’s marrow. When they transplanted bone marrow from those mice into healthy mice that were then challenged with AML cells, all of the transplant recipients survived while a control group of mice succumbed to AML within 30 days, indicating that the immune protection against AML was sustained and transferable.

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https://scienceblog.com/513491/solid-vaccine-eliminates-acute-myeloid-leukemia-in-mice/

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Goldilocks Stars Are Best Places To Look For Life

January 15, 2020

Goldilocks Stars Are Best Places to Look for Life

In the search for life beyond Earth, astronomers look for planets in a star’s “habitable zone” — sometimes nicknamed the “Goldilocks zone” — where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface to nurture life as we know it.

An emerging idea, bolstered by a three-decade-long set of stellar surveys, is that there are “Goldilocks stars” — not too hot, not too cool, and above all, not too violent to host life-friendly planets.

Because our Sun has nurtured life on Earth for nearly 4 billion years, conventional wisdom would suggest that stars like it would be prime candidates in the search for other potentially habitable worlds. In reality, stars slightly cooler and less luminous than our Sun, classified as K dwarfs, are the true “Goldilocks stars,” said Edward Guinan of Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania. “K-dwarf stars are in the ‘sweet spot,’ with properties intermediate between the rarer, more luminous, but shorter-lived solar-type stars (G stars) and the more numerous red dwarf stars (M stars). The K stars, especially the warmer ones, have the best of all worlds. If you are looking for planets with habitability, the abundance of K stars pump up your chances of finding life.”

For starters, there are three times as many K dwarfs in our galaxy as stars like our Sun. Roughly 1,000 K stars lie within 100 light-years of our Sun as prime candidates for exploration. These so-called orange dwarfs live from 15 billion to 45 billion years. By contrast, our Sun, now already halfway through its lifetime, lasts for only 10 billion years. Its comparatively rapid rate of stellar evolution will leave the Earth largely uninhabitable in just another 1 or 2 billion years. “Solar-type stars limit how long a planet’s atmosphere can remain stable,” Guinan said. That’s because a billion or so years from now, Earth will orbit inside the hotter (inner) edge of the Sun’s habitable zone, which moves outward as the Sun grows warmer and brighter. As a result, the Earth will be desiccated as it loses its present atmosphere and oceans. By an age of 9 billion years the Sun will have swelled up to become a red giant that could engulf the Earth.

Despite their small size, the even more abundant red dwarf stars, also known as M dwarf stars, have even longer lifetimes and appear to be hostile to life as we know it. Planets that are located in a red dwarf’s comparatively narrow habitable zone, which is very close to the star, are exposed to extreme levels of X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) radiation, which can be up to hundreds of thousands of times more intense than what Earth receives from the Sun. A relentless fireworks show of flares and coronal mass ejections bombard planets with a dragon’s breath of seething plasma and showers of penetrating high-energy particles. Red dwarf habitable-zone planets can be baked bone dry and have their atmospheres stripped away very early in their lives. This could likely prohibit the planets from evolving to be more hospitable a few billion years after red dwarf outbursts have subsided. “We’re not so optimistic anymore about the chances of finding advanced life around many M stars,” Guinan said.

The K dwarfs do not have intensely active magnetic fields that power strong X-ray and UV emissions and energetic outbursts, and therefore they shoot off flares much less frequently, based on Guinan’s research. Accompanying planets would get about 1/100th as much deadly X-ray radiation as those orbiting the close-in habitable zones of magnetically active M stars.

In a program called the “GoldiloKs” Project, Guinan and his Villanova colleague Scott Engle, are working with undergraduate students to measure the age, rotation rate, and X-ray and far-ultraviolet radiation in a sampling of mostly cool G and K stars.They are using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) XMM-Newton satellite for their observations. Hubble’s sensitive ultraviolet-light observations of radiation from hydrogen were used to assess the radiation from a sample of about 20 orange dwarfs. “Hubble is the only telescope that can do this kind of observation,” Guinan said.

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https://scienceblog.com/513474/goldilocks-stars-are-best-places-to-look-for-life/