FedCIRC will work with university's CERT
Connecting state and local government leaders
The Federal Computer Incident Response Center is putting together a pilot to stop hacker attacks on agency Web sites. FedCIRC, a General Services Administration unit that is to be part of the proposed Homeland Security Department, is joining with Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center to collect and analyze data from sensors in agency firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
The Federal Computer Incident Response Center is putting together a pilot to stop hacker attacks on agency Web sites. FedCIRC, a General Services Administration unit that is to be part of the proposed Homeland Security Department, is joining with Carnegie Mellon University's CERT Coordination Center to collect and analyze data from sensors in agency firewalls and intrusion detection systems.
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'We want to give agencies some analysis so they know more about incidents that occur on their sites,' said Sallie McDonald, assistant commissioner in the Federal Technology Service's Office of Information Assurance and Critical Infrastructure Protection. 'We also will feed the data to FedCIRC so we can do the same kind of analysis governmentwide.'
McDonald said agency managers could go to the FedCIRC portal to watch what is happening agencywide and governmentwide. 'We will be able to see trends and warn agencies if we see an attack occurring in government,' she said.
Four or five agencies will take part in the pilot this fall, and full implementation would occur about a year later, McDonald said.
Meanwhile, FedCIRC will issue two requests for proposals this summer. One will be for a secure knowledge management portal for federal employees involved in network security, McDonald said. Systems administrators, CIOs and other officials would have access there to FedCIRC tools and services and could communicate with each other in a secure environment. The portal also would provide access to FedCIRC's security patch management site that Science Applications International Corp. is developing.
The second RFP will be for packaging a security tool kit of federally developed programs from the National Institute for Science and Technology and the National Security Agency.
'These are all tools that have been tested by government that agencies could use at no cost,' McDonald said. 'We want to cut down on expense and standardize the types of security tools used across government so assessments are done similarly.'