marchaase

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is the organization within the US Department of Defense responsible for providing IT connectivity and guidelines for securing those assets. Until today, the only Secure Technical Implementation Guideline (STIG) that existed were for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7, which limited the traction that Ubuntu was able to make within the DoD.

Last month, DISA authorized the release (pdf) of a STIG for Ubuntu 16.04, which paves the way for the owners of DoD systems to approve inclusion on Ubuntu on US DoD systems. The STIG was released to the public this week. This a big deal, since it's the first STIG for a free (as in beer) operating system.

The STIG can be found here. An viewing application to parse the XML content can be found here.

Prepare for the deluge of DoD contractors looking for support.