Raytheon [RTN] on Monday said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has re-awarded the company a potential $1 billion contract to support a cyber security system that the department uses to help protect federal civilian networks.
Raytheon originally won the Development, Operations and Maintenance (DOMino) contract in Sept. 2015 but a protest Northrop Grumman [NOC], one of the losing bidders, held up work on the contract until DHS took corrective actions and then reaffirmed the original award in June of 2016. But DHS then cancelled the award, a department spokesman told Defense Daily on Monday.
DOMino is classified. The program supports the National Cybersecurity Protection System (NCPS), better known as EINSTEIN, which is a platform that DHS uses to monitor, detect, and prevent malicious Internet traffic as it tries to cross into network systems operated by federal civilian agencies.
The original contract to support EINSTEIN was performed by General Dynamics [GD] although DOMino was a new competition for a repackaged scope of work.
The indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract is for five years.
Raytheon said it will help develop the next-generation of the NCPS and deliver new and upgraded capabilities that include intrusion detection and prevention, automation, analytics, and information sharing.
“Raytheon stands ready to help protect the networks of more than 100 federal government departments and agencies,” David Wajsgras, president of the company’s Intelligence, Information and Services sector, said in a statement. “Our cutting-edge vulnerability testing, proactive threat hunting and remediation technologies will enable critical systems to be resilient in the face of ever increasing cyber attacks.”
DHS plans to reduce its investment in NCPS in FY ’18 as acquisition efforts slow to focus on sustainment of the current capability. In FY ’18 DHS plans to integrate non-signature based threat detection capabilities into the system, and provide analytics capabilities to “improve the ability to prioritize cyber risks, automatically triage incidents, enrich indicators automatically, and automate response actions to protect D/As and other stakeholders,” according to budget documents. D/As refers to departments and agencies.
The documents also say that the planned investments in FY ’18 will be for developing Blocks 2.2 and 3.0. Block 2.2 is aimed at providing sharing of cyber security information in a secure environment at all classification levels across federal, state, local, tribal, private and international partners.
For Block 3.0, the goal is “to provide an active intrusion prevention capability that conducts threat-based decision making on network traffic entering or leaving the Federal Executive Branch civilian networks and disables attempted intrusions before harm is done,” the documents say.
DHS is seeking $56.1 million in the investment account for NCPS in FY ’18.