Agencies made significant steps toward increasing PIV usage during the “Cyber Sprint” with federal agencies increasing their use of strong authentication for privileged and unprivileged users from 42% to 72%.

The second installment of the re:ID eID series highlights Asia. The countries with the most significant influences in the region are those with the largest populations, China and India. The growth of eID issuance in Asia will greatly hinge upon how these countries have and will decide to implement and issue credentials to their citizens.

Gemalto announced the SafeNet Luna SA 6, a hardware security module built for service providers to offer crypto processing, key management and key storage in the cloud; Carillon Information Security Inc. announced that it now provides validation services for companies and government agencies looking for X.509 certificate path discovery and validation solutions; MorphoTrak announced that Teresa Wu has joined the company as director of Strategic Marketing and Government Relations; LEGIC announced that Cardag Deutschland GmbH would be a partner to its ID Network.

Evgeny Chereshnev, the global head of social media for IT security company Kaspersky Lab, was trying to figure out how individual’s can have better control over their personal information and decided on an experiment. It started with him implanting an NFC chip in his hand and trading in his work badge and he’s hoping it will to continue with more applications. Chereshnev spoke with Re:ID’s Gina Jordan about the experiment.

Bills submitted in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate proposes a smart card pilot program for Medicaid recipients. If passed through Congress and signed into law the bill would require the Department of Health and Human Services to initiate a smart card pilot for Medicaid recipients.

The focus of cybersecurity has been on building better defenses but the front door has been left open as 4% of cybersecurity spending goes to identity. As more information is readily available on the dark web more needs to be done to secure identities online.

Medicare doles out more than $600 billion a year to health care organizations. Specific fraud statistics range but estimates suggest $20 billion is going toward fraudulent claims. The Medicare ID card is paper, has the owner’s Social Security number printed on it and bears no real security features. The GAO examined how different card technology could be used to prevent some of this fraud.