Author: Marcus Bailey

WASHINGTON: The US government issued a joint advisory Thursday warning of the ongoing “active exploitation” of a “critical” vulnerability in a popular password management solution, which “poses a serious risk to critical infrastructure companies, US-cleared defense contractors, academic institutions, and other entities that use the software.”

A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) official told Breaking Defense after this report’s original publication, “As exploitation of this product can lead to full identity compromise, CISA is taking this vulnerability very seriously and requests information from any organizations that may have been impacted.”

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Sen. Gary Peters, D-Mich., chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said on Sept. 15 that the United States’ supply chains are not resilient, and strengthening those supply chains is going to be critical for U.S. competitiveness going forward.

During a Politico event on Sept. 15, Sen. Peters described how the shortage of semiconductor chips and the overreliance on foreign manufacturers for critical supplies poses a huge concern for the United States.

“Although we have highly efficient supply chains, they are not resilient, and they’re not resilient to disruptions,” Sen. Peters said during the event. “We’ve got to create more resilience in our supply chains and particularly critical equipment, whether it’s medical supplies or as was mentioned, chips, which are basically in all of our products.”

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The House Energy and Commerce Committee was still in the process late Monday of marking up its portion of the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation bill working its way through the House, but at our deadline was making a big splash with $10 billion of proposed funding for supply chain security.

The E&C committee’s portion of the legislation features billions of proposed spending for supply chains, distance learning, and more.

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The purpose of this study is to investigate how artificial intelligence (AI), as well as machine learning (ML) techniques, are being applied and implemented within supply chains (SC) and to develop future research directions from thereof.

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WASHINGTON: The Defense Department has created a new task force dedicated to addressing ongoing challenges with its supply chain visibility and resiliency, including ways to mitigate risk.

Gregory Kausner, who is currently handling the duties of under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, stood up the Supply Chain Resiliency Working Group on Aug. 30, the Pentagon said last week.

“A comprehensive strategic approach will take time, dedicated attention, and resources,” Kausner said in a Department release announcing the task force. “Effective implementation begins with understanding our vulnerabilities and the necessary responses, so we can focus our efforts to build greater resiliency across critical supply chains.”

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MS. RAYMOND:  Good morning, everyone.  And thank you so much, Brad.  To all our participants, thank you for joining us for this embargoed briefing today.

     We will be providing an overview of the American Pandemic Preparedness Plan, also entitled “Transforming our Capabilities,” which will advance the President’s commitment to building back better for the next biological threat.

We’ll start with some comments from our speakers.  Today, we have the President’s Science Advisor and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as well as a member of the President’s Cabinet, Dr. Eric Lander; as well as the Special Assistant to the President and National Security Council Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biodefense, Dr. Beth Cameron.

After they both give initial remarks, we’ll open it up for question-and-answer.

     As a reminder, this briefing is on the record, but the call contents and the materials that we shared prior to the call are embargoed until 3:00 p.m. this afternoon.  

And with that, I’ll turn it over to our speakers, starting with Dr. Lander.

DR. LANDER:  Well, thank you very much, and good morning to everybody and thank you for joining the call.  So, my name is Eric Lander.  I’m the President’s Science Advisor and I’m the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

     And today, we’re releasing a plan for transforming U.S. capabilities to prepare for and respond rapidly and effectively to future pandemics and other high-consequence biological threats.

Digital Supply Chains (DSCs) are highly integrated global internet communities of customers, distributors, producers, and suppliers. DSCs have increasingly incorporated Internet of Things (IoT) innovations such as field sensors and real time condition monitoring; and have served as effective platforms for IoT technology diffusion. However, as IoT has become more pervasive, pushing the edges of networks further out, new cyber threat windows have opened everywhere. More recently, Cyber-Supply Chain Risk Management (C-SCRM) has emerged as a critical discipline combining expertise from cybersecurity, supply chain management and enterprise risk management; and designed to stem the proliferation of digital supply chain attacks seeking illicit access to corporate networks for competitive espionage, financial and intellectual property theft, and disruption of operations. Yet to date, there has been little evidence that C-SCRM practices are actually effective in containing all or even some types of breaches.

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This paper seeks to complement the supply chain risk monitoring literature by identifying analytics methods and the risk indicators being monitored for this purpose. This includes the underlying supply chain data used for short-term or even real-time monitoring of risks in supply chain risk management.

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A widespread shortage of liquid oxygen linked to the latest wave of the pandemic could affect SpaceX’s launch schedule, a company executive said Aug. 24.

Speaking on a panel at the 36th Space Symposium here, Gwynne Shotwell, president and chief operating officer of SpaceX, cited difficulties in securing supplies of liquid oxygen as one of its biggest supply chain concerns.

“We’re actually going to be impacted this year with the lack of liquid oxygen for launch,” she said. “We certainly are going to make sure the hospitals are going to have the oxygen that they need, but for anybody who has liquid oxygen to spare, send me an email.”

Liquid oxygen is one of the most commonly used propellants in launch vehicles. It serves as an oxidizer in combination with fuels such as liquid hydrogen, kerosene and methane.

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