On Tuesday this week the White House asked for $154 million in new money to help in the fight against the computer nega-verse.
From FCW:
It has been rumored that White House officials may announce a new cybersecurity initiative, but it is unclear whether this is it or just a piece of it.
In the request, the administration asked for $115 million to enhance DHS’ ability to deploy the Einstein program through the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team. Einstein monitors about 13 participating agencies’ network gateways for traffic patterns that indicate the presence of computer worms or other unwanted traffic. By collecting traffic information summaries at agency gateways, Einstein gives US-CERT analysts and participating agencies a big-picture view of bad activity on federal networks.
“They know monitoring works and they want more monitoring,” said Alan Paller, director of research at the Sans Institute. “The money will be used to get out more monitoring more quickly and do more analysis of the data. That is useful and necessary because what they discovered is the federal perimeter is broken. One of few ways to find bad guys in [the] perimeter is a more intent analysis of traffic coming out of the computers.”
No word on whether or not Jack Bauer will receive a new “socket” into the US CERT network.
Tags: Security Spending, Cyber Security Spending, Federal Computer Security
