Wednesday, November 20, 2002

Regional Forum on e-Crime and Cyberterrorism ITAA and the US Attorney's Office, District of Utah sponsored a Regional Forum on Combating e-Crime and Cyberterrorism today.  It was a good event focused on developing cooperation between business and law enforcement.  I think they are planning to use it as a model for similar events around the country.  I particularly enjoyed Andy Purdy's presentation on Cyber Threats to Our National Critical Infrastructure.  Andy is a Senior Advisor for IT Security and Privacy to the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board.  I do not have an electronic copy of Andy's presentation, but he did a similar presentation to the health care sector a couple of months ago.  He was a key player in the development of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace.  A stong contingent from INEEL was on hand.  They are really pushing their capabilities as a potential test facility for critical infrastructure protection, including cybersecurity.  Many of the topics were very timely, given the passage of the homeland security bill yesterday. Rob Clyde, CTO of Symantec, gave a good keynote on combatting e-crime and cyberterrorism.  Rob lives in Utah so it might be nice to have him speak to our SISC. Do you know what a honeypot is?  DoJ's honeypot expert spoke on various legal aspects of cyber crime investigation and prosecution.  Here's an interesting presentation on honeypots.  Check cybercrime.gov for more on federal efforts. If I get time, I'll say a little more about this, since I have a number of related action items I'd like to pursue.... 4:39:48 PM

Incident Management I attended the Utah Counter-Terrrorism Coordination Council meeting yesterday.  Someone mentioned that 48 states have now joined the interstate Emergency Management Assistance Compact which was coordinated through NEMA.  On NEMA's website, I discovered that the National Institute of Justice has completed a special report comparing incident management systems.  We used a system called E-Team during the olympics with many different agencies at all levels of government and over 800 logins.  The implementation was supported by SAIC.  7:17:00 AM

Physical Security The federal government manages 3.2 billion square feet of facility space.  That's a huge challenge.  I know because the state manages 45 million square feet, but a major portion of that is in the colleges and universities which have their own facility management organizations.  Just the managing the portion that DFCM has remains a significant responsibility.  Increasingly, facility managers are turning to automation and online systems to manage things like security, maintenance, construction, environmentals, etc.  The GAO also recently released this report on the status of security at federal facilities. 7:04:02 AM

More on TIA Doc Searles and Alan Mathers both discuss the Pentagon's TIA proposal.  Dan Hersam's website has a post entitled Forget TIPS, TIA is the real deal back on August 8th which references this article in Wired.  Actually, I would be much more worried about all the junk that businesses have stored about me and the potential for identity theft and other possibilities than I am about anything the DoD or FBI might want to store.  There are always companies trying to find new ways to get into your pocketbook as well.  At least I don't think that's the goal of TIA and I expect that TIA's data will be better secured.  On the other hand, GAO is again reporting that federal systems remain at risk. Ariticle in SiliconValley.com 6:48:35 AM

© Copyright 2003 David Fletcher.