Homeland Security elaborates, slightly, on Cyber Security Initiative

After ducking questions this year from both Congress and the private sector about its so-called National Cyber Security Initiative, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Monday finally revealed a little more. Deputy Security for the Department of Homeland Security Paul Schneider, along with other senior federal officials, offered more information at a forum hosted by the Information Technology Association of America. Plans for the initiative include enhancing the current cyber intrusion detection system, working more closely with the private sector (a longstanding federal mantra), and focusing on foreign threats. "Cybersecurity really is one of the top priorities of the Department of Homeland Security and the federal government," Schneider said. He called the Cyber Security Initiative "probably unprecedented in terms of the amount of coordination within the federal government and between the federal government and the private sector." The DHS is upgrading its intrusion detection system, called Einstein, beyond its currently limited, reactive capabilities. "We'll be deploying a much more aggressive system that will allow us to look for patterns of malicious code -- to shut them down before they do real harm," Schneider said. (It was unclear what he meant. "Shutting down" a botnet conducting malicious activity would mean invading infected PCs around the world; on the other hand, it could simply mean DHS reconfiguring its own network to ignore certain malicious activity.)