Feds plan cybersecurity center

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.computerworld.com/governmenttopics/government/policy/story/0,10801,73922,00.html

By DAN VERTON 
SEPTEMBER 02, 2002
Washington 

As the White House last week began putting the final touches on its
long-awaited National Plan for Protecting Cyberspace, administration
officials took issue with a press report that suggested the plan would
include provisions to expand the government's data collection and
surveillance.

The plan, which is scheduled to be released Sept. 18 during a ceremony
at Stanford University, does include a provision to build a
cybersecurity network operations center. However, a published report
suggesting that the NOC would collect and examine e-mail and data
traffic from major Internet service providers and other private-sector
companies is misleading and inaccurate, said Tiffany Olson, an
assistant to Richard Clarke, chairman of the President's Critical
Infrastructure Protection Board and the principal force behind the
strategy.

Olson said the published report is necessarily inaccurate because the
plan hasn't even been finished.

"There were many initial drafts, and many organizations provided
input," she said. "But we've just started to finalize it this week."

The concept of developing a federal NOC is definitely in the strategy,
but not with the aim of gathering e-mail data or expanding government
surveillance, Olson said. Rather, the federal NOC would be modeled
after the Bethesda, Md.-based SANS Institute's Incidents.org Web site
and Internet Storm Center, a virtual organization of advanced
intrusion-detection analysts, forensics experts and incident handlers
from across the globe.

Howard Schmidt, co-chairman of the Critical Infrastructure Protection
Board, told Computerworld last week that the plan is to simply ask for
greater voluntary data sharing on matters such as viruses and worms.  
He also stressed that establishing a central NOC isn't part of a plan
to increase the government's surveillance of private data.

Schmidt said the need for a central government NOC stems from the lack
of a single collection point where government security can be
analyzed. This central NOC would collect data from other government
NOCs, such as the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center and
the Pentagon's Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense.

These NOCs, in turn, would function in a fashion similar to the
private sector's Information Sharing and Analysis Centers (ISAC) -
alliances formed within vertical industries to improve information
sharing about security vulnerabilities and threats.

The SANS Storm Center uses advanced data correlation and visualization
techniques to analyze data collected from more than 3,000 firewalls
and intrusion-detection systems in more than 60 countries. "We're
hoping the [ISACs] one day establish their own independent Storm
Center network," said Alan Paller, director of the SANS Institute.

And that may be much easier to do now that Redwood City, Calif.-based
Check Point Software Technologies Ltd., which operates more than 63%
of all firewalls worldwide, is adding a Storm Center client in every
one of its 260,000 gateways, said Paller. "That means anyone who wants
to set up a Storm Center network can just tell their members to turn
on the client and point it to their network node," he said.

A Work in Progress

Although "sworn to secrecy" about the specific contents of the
administration's plan, Harris Miller, president of the Arlington,
Va.-based Information Technology Association of America, said last
week that the plan remained "in a state of flux" and that any
information made public to date "may or may not still be in the
document when it is released."

The Bush administration also plans to release a revision of the
forthcoming plan as early as January, Schmidt said during a recent
press briefing at the White House. The revision will include details
on "definitive programs," he said. In addition, plans call for another
seven town hall meetings to be held around the country after the Sept.  
18 release, to gather more feedback from both the private sector and
the general public, he said.

Officials underscored the voluntary nature of the public/ private
partnership, noting that the White House isn't legally capable of
forcing any sort of data-sharing agreements on the private sector.  
What the government can and plans to do, however, is "create
government as a model," said Schmidt.

In an interview with Computerworld last month, Clarke said the plan
may include a governmentwide policy that requires all IT purchases to
be independently certified for security prior to approval. Such a
policy, which is currently in effect at the Defense Department, was
being "looked at carefully," but at that point no decision had been
made, he said.




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