The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is not effectively protecting sensitive information exchanged with external entities. Of four leading practices for such oversight, HUD did not address one practice and only minimally addressed the other three in its security and privacy policies and procedures. For example, HUD minimally addressed the first leading practice because its policy

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has faced challenges in its efforts to accomplish three critical information technology (IT) modernization initiatives: the department's health information system, known as the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture (VistA); a system for the Family Caregiver Program, which is to support family caregivers of seriously injured post-9/

Selected agencies—the Federal Aviation Administration, Indian Health Services, and Small Business Administration—had generally deployed tools intended to provide cybersecurity data to support the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Continuous Diagnostics and Mitigation (CDM) program. As depicted in the figure, the program relies on automated tools to identify hardware and software residin

Although the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and Social Security Administration (SSA) each established requirements to secure data that states receive, these requirements often had conflicting parameters. Such parameters involve agencies defining specific values like the number of consecutive unsuccessful log

As GAO reported in September 2019, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) bolstered the capacity and performance of the Electronic Comment Filing System (ECFS) to reduce the risk of future service disruptions. FCC also implemented numerous information security program and technical controls for three systems that were intended to safeguard the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of

The Department of Defense (DOD) has not fully implemented three of its key initiatives and practices aimed at improving cyber hygiene. Carnegie-Mellon University defines cyber hygiene as a set of practices for managing the most common and pervasive cybersecurity risks. In discussions with GAO, DOD officials identified three department-wide cyber hygiene initiatives: the 2015 DOD Cybersecurity Cul

The Office of Congressional Workplace Rights (OCWR) did not incorporate key cybersecurity management practices into the planning for its Secure Online Claims Reporting and Tracking E-filing System (SOCRATES) project. While OCWR drafted a SOCRATES project schedule, the office did not finalize and use this schedule to manage cybersecurity activities, such as the time frames for conducting informati

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has established a five-step process for developing and overseeing the implementation of binding operational directives, as authorized by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (FISMA). The process includes DHS coordinating with stakeholders early in the directives' development process and validating agencies' actions on the directives.

Federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), continue to have deficient information security programs. For example, in fiscal year 2018, inspectors general (IGs) used a five-level maturity model to rate agency information security policies, procedures, and practices related to the five core security functions—identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover—established

During fiscal year 2018, many federal agencies were often not adequately or effectively implementing their information security policies and practices. For example, most of the 16 agencies GAO selected for review had deficiencies related to implementing the eight elements of an agency-wide information security program required by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act of 2014 (FISMA).