Cybersecurity

ManTech International Corporation announced today that it received a new contract to support the U.S. Department of Agriculture Office of the Chief Information Officer, Agriculture Security Operations Center. ManTech will provide continous incident handling and strategic support to help detect and report malicious cyber activities on the agency's enterprise information infrastructure. The contract is estimated to be worth nearly $11 million.

A different cybersecurity culture needs to be diffused throughout the Defense Department. It will have to view cyberdefenses not as a bandage to be selectively applied to a patchwork of applications. The new cybersecurity must become an inseparable feature of every computer technology that enables our operations.

Defense Department leadership appears to be viewing cyberdefense issues primarily as a matter of policy and strategy that can be fixed incrementally. That is not possible. Cyberdefense deficiencies have became deeply rooted as result of the defective ways in which the Defense Department acquired IT over the past decades. Cyberdefense flaws are inherently enterprise-wide and are mostly not application specific.

The nation's largest, simultaneous high school cybersecurity competition is back, and students across the nation have until October 8 to sign up. Winners will walk away from CyberPatriot III with scholarships and the knowledge of how to defend computer networks against real-life threats.

The U.S. Defense Department must secure the cyber domain to protect and defend its own information and U.S. citizens, Gen. Keith B. Alexander, USA, commander of U.S. Cyber Command said today during the opening address of LandWarNet 2010. Gen. Alexander also serves as the director of the National Security Agency. "Every link and system has vulnerabilities that we have to defend," he stated.

Paul Strassmann offers his insights on network virtualization as an answer to cyber security concerns about the proliferation of things contributing to the "attack surface," such as networks, circuits and computers.

Paul Strassmann continues from last week's "Gentlemen Do Not Open Attachments" with illustrations of how to implement safe social computing using virtual computers.

"At the end of the day, it's about the warfighter."--Lt. Gen. Dennis Vis, USA, director, C4 systems, Joint Staff

"A lot of our warfare in the future is going to be electronic. Our enemies are going to try to take us down either through our Defense Department systems or through other systems."--Lisa N. Wolford, founder, president and CEO of CSSS.NET

"Stop pontificating about the rules and be an example." --Marc Sachs Verizon says to goverment agencies about cybersecurity practices