DHS teams hunt for weaknesses in federal cyber networks

Jason Miller
Federal News Radio
July 11, 2012

The Homeland Security Department is going into agency networks to find the soft spots-places where cybersecurity defenses are weakest and pose the greatest risks.

DHS’ Federal Network Security branch, under the National Protection and Programs Directorate, is having little trouble finding agencies’ soft cyber underbelly.

Take one agency who asked DHS to perform a “Red Team” exercise, it thought it had 2,000 to 3,000 computers on a specific network, but Homeland Security’s team stopped counting at 9,000. Rob Karas, the program manager of the risk evaluation program, or Red Teaming initiative, at DHS, said until the agency understood its network better it wasn’t worth continuing.

“We worked with them and helped them identify why they had so many hosts on their network and how they could architect and design it better,” he said in an interview with Federal News Radio. “We worked with them to remove hosts or close off networks that shouldn’t have been there.”

Full story here.

This article was posted: Wednesday, July 11, 2012 at 10:04 am

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