US government networks received an average of 15,000 cyber attacks per day last year, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official.
Sean McGurk, director of the Control Systems Security Program in the DHS National Cyber Security Division (NCSD), told a House panel that Einstein 2, the federal government’s network intrusion detection system, registered a total of 5.4 million “hits” in 2010, an average of 450,000 hits per month and 15,000 per day.“A hit is an alert triggered by a predetermined intrusion detection signature that corresponds to a known threat. Each hit represents potential malicious activity for further assessment” by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), McGurk told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform’s national security, homeland defense, and foreign operations subcommittee during May 25 testimony.
Einstein 2 has so far been deployed at 15 of the 19 large federal departments and agencies that maintain their own locations for the Trusted Internet Connections (TIC) initiative, which is designed to consolidate the number of external internet connections at federal agencies, the DHS official said. Read More
