New Cybersecurity Standard for Federal Agencies to Combat Organized Threats

Most recent attacks were written and released by bored youngsters testing their skills, but the government is becoming more concerned about organized attacks against federal computers from terrorists or foreign governments. Several government agencies have had their own security standards for some time. What is new about Wednesday's announcement is that the various agencies have agreed on a single standard - a difficult task that occurred about three months ago.. . .

Most recent attacks were written and released by bored youngsters testing their skills, but the government is becoming more concerned about organized attacks against federal computers from terrorists or foreign governments. Several government agencies have had their own security standards for some time. What is new about Wednesday's announcement is that the various agencies have agreed on a single standard - a difficult task that occurred about three months ago.

Experts at the CIS, the NSA and Commerce's National Institute for Standards and Technology had three different candidates for standards at first. On April 18, the authors met in a room at NIST offices in Maryland.

"They were told they could leave as soon as they came to an agreement," said Alan Paller of the Sans Institute, a research and education group involved in the announcement.

That night, they had a document several hundred pages long describing how to make Windows 2000 secure, but still usable.

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