From: InfoSec News (isnC4I.ORG)
Date: Thu Apr 05 2001 - 19:46:42 CDT

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http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/0402/web-saic-04-05-01.asp

BY Diane Frank
04/05/2001

Federal agencies soon will have a commercial resource at their beck
and call when dealing with security vulnerabilities and cyberattacks.

The Federal Computer Incident Response Capability, the central
civilian organization for security alerts and recovery, last week
signed a contract with Science Applications International Corp. and
its partner Global Integrity Information Security to provide the
day-to-day operations for the center.

Responsibilities include issuing vulnerability alerts and helping
agencies respond and recover when actually hit with a cyberattack,
said Dave Jarrell, director of FedCIRC, which is based at the General
Services Administration.

That service has been provided by the Computer Emergency Response Team
Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University. The partnership
with Carnegie Mellon will continue, but the CERT Coordination Center
will focus on analysis, such as determining patterns in attacks,
Jarrell said.

"Their strength is in their analytical capabilities," Jarrell said
Wednesday at the GSA Federal Technology Services Networking conference
in Las Vegas.

SAIC and Global Integrity now part of Predictive Systems Inc. but an
SAIC subsidiary until last year have secure operations centers around
the world, including in Japan and Europe. This will enable them to
quickly gather vulnerability information to form alerts no matter
where the problem starts, said Gene Hunt, corporate vice president of
the system security and engineering operation at SAIC.

The two companies proved their effectiveness during the "ILOVEYOU"
e-mail virus from the Philippines in May 2000. They were able to
inform their customer, the Financial Services Information Sharing and
Analysis Center, about the virus and how to counteract it hours before
even the Defense Department could spread the word to the United
States.

Now with FedCIRC, SAIC will be able to inform civilian agencies of
potential threats found by other customers, such as the FS/ISAC, Hunt
said.

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