Another CIO retirement, Lerner's email and an unpatched software alert

Intelligence CIO retires

Al Tarasiuk retired as CIO of the intelligence community on April 28 after more than four years at the helm.

In a statement, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper credited Tarasiuk with advancing the IC Information Technology Enterprise, an ongoing quest for a single, standards-based IT architecture across intelligence agencies.

Tarasiuk helped the intelligence agency CIOs "through this important transformational effort," Clapper's statement said. Tarasiuk's work has "drawn the IC closer together to work better, faster and smarter. This is exactly what Congress intended when it empowered the IC CIO with community-wide authority over enterprise architecture."

Tarasiuk joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1988 and served as its CIO from 2005 to 2010 before assuming that role for the broader intelligence community.

IG uncovers thousands of missing Lerner emails

The Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration said roughly 6,400 emails to or from Lois Lerner, the former director of the IRS's Exempt Organizations Division, have been found and turned over to congressional investigators, The Hill newspaper reported.

The emails were sent between 2004 and 2013. The IRS claimed last year that Lerner's computer crashed in 2011, resulting in the loss of an unknown number of emails.

The IG said about 650 of the rediscovered emails were from 2010 and 2011, and most were from 2012, according to The Hill. About 35,000 emails were recovered in all from recycled back-up tapes.

Lerner has been accused of improperly focusing reviews of tax-exempt status on political opponents of the Obama administration.

CERT cites unpatched software risks

The Department of Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Readiness Team issued a list of the top 30 targeted high-risk vulnerabilities from unpatched software on April 29.

A notice from CERT said the top 30 vulnerabilities could affect systems running unpatched software from Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle or OpenSSL. Internet Explorer, Office Word, Excel and Acrobat are all on the list.

The alert noted that cyber threat organizations continue to use unpatched software to attack critical infrastructure providers, but 85 percent of those attacks could be prevented if root vulnerabilities are corrected.