The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity division is spearheading an aggressive new project to create a real-time cybersituation-awareness system, a senior DHS official said this week.. . .
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's cybersecurity division is spearheading an aggressive new project to create a real-time cybersituation-awareness system, a senior DHS official said this week.

The aim of the system is to provide a nationwide capability to conduct instant analysis of security incident data for signs of coordinated attacks or major virus and worm outbreaks.

Teaming Up

Sallie McDonald, the senior executive responsible for outreach and awareness efforts at the agency, said the National Cyber Security Division of the DHS is working with SRI International, Symantec, and Computer Associates International to develop a nonproprietary data collection system that will run on an automated security extranet and feed incident reports to the various Information Sharing and Analysis Centers operating in the private sector. The ISACs would then feed the data to the national situation-awareness system.

"We will be deploying this in the federal sector, starting at the U.S. CERT first so we can see in real time what is happening across the nation," said McDonald. The DHS announced on September 15 the formation of a computer emergency response team, U.S. CERT, which is the result of a combined effort of the Federal Computer Incident Response Center and the CERT Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University.

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