At stake is not just a $10 billion IT contract, but an information age weapon.

The famously hoodie-clad founder of the Defense Digital Service defends his legacy as he prepares to hand over the helm.

WASHINGTON The massive and troubled $10 billion cloud contract the Pentagon has been pursuing has run into another snag. DoD revealed Tuesday it has obtained “new information” pointing to potential of conflicts of interest in the competition, already widely criticized for favoring Amazon Web Services. Pentagon spokesperson Elissa Smith confirmed to Breaking Defense that “new… Keep reading →

HackerOne, Synack, and newcomer Bugcrowd split up to $34 million.

“I just had a general who came to my office,” said Chris Lynch, head of DoD’s internal hoodie-wearing geek squad, the Defense Digital Service. “The problem was the entire mission was being run out of Excel.”

In a world where knowledge increasingly matters more than physical power, US troops can’t quickly access vital information in a labyrinth of often incompatible and inaccessible databases. The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure — archly acronymized as JEDI — aims to fix all that.

A project called Hack the Air Force is paying “white hat” hackers over $130,000 for finding weak points in its websites, the service announced this morning. It’s the Defense Department’s third “bug bounty” – a high-profile initiative of Obama’s last Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter, that’s survived under Trump. [CORRECTED FIGURES} Hack the Pentagon  found 138 unique,… Keep reading →

President Donald Trump’s six latest nominees to lead the Pentagon provide some hope for those who have long been frustrated with the Defense Department’s roadblocks to procuring innovative technologies. From the Boeing executive who spent time on the company’s successful commercial side who’s been picked for Deputy Defense Secretary, to the House Armed Services aide who crafted the… Keep reading →

ARLINGTON: The Air Force got blasted from Donald Trump’s bully pulpit before the President-Elect was even inaugurated. It looks like 2017 — the youngest service’s 70th year — will be full of presidential turbulence. [We rolled out our crystal balls for our 2017 forecast. Click to read the whole series.] Outgoing Air Force Secretary Deborah… Keep reading →

PENTAGON: Excited by the success of April’s Hack The Pentagon contest, the Defense Department will allow so-called white hat hackers to test all its unclassified public websites. First, a new policy released today encourages anyone  to look for weaknesses in any public DoD site, as long as they report what they find. Then, for a select subset of… Keep reading →