By Calvin Biesecker
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in FY ’10 plans to host a new competition to obtain analysts and support for the operations of its security team that responds to and defends against cyber attacks to federal civilian networks, a department official said last week.
The re-competition of the US CERT (United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team) Operations contract for analysts will help with the growth of the security team’s capabilities, Nicole Dean, deputy director of the DHS National Cyber Security Division, said at a DHS Acquisition Industry Day last Thursday.
“As we grow our capabilities as an organization and expand to all the departments and agencies to provide cyber protection coverage, the US CERT operations analysts floor needs to grow,” Dean said.
General Dynamics [GD] is the current support contractor for US CERT.
Dean is also the program manager for the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), which is the focal point within the NCSD for cyber activity analysis and response.
NCPS is the “end-to-end system” for cyber security and is supported in part by the Einstein program, a cyber intrusion detection system that DHS is deploying for the federal civilian Internet domains.
Einstein is being deployed in increments and in FY ’10 a key focus will be on the Einstein 3.0 iteration, Dean said. Einstein 3.0 will provide an intrusion prevention service for the federal government.
The current version of Einstein, Einstein 1.0, is basically an observation and collection tool to identify malicious activity in federal computer networks. It has no real-time detection capability.
Einstein 2.0, which is being deployed, does provide intrusion detection services.
A classified Request for Information (RFI) recently was released for Einstein 3.0. Dean said her office is evaluating industry’s responses with additional RFIs possibly forthcoming. The hope is for this to lead to a classified Request for Proposals for Einstein 3.0, she said.
The NCPS and US CERT Operations contracts are the two largest acquisition programs within NCSD currently, Dean said.