Alaska Leads Fed Agencies By Example

Federal agencies that put off efforts to tighten cybersecurity should follow Alaska's lead: Even though a hacker invasion into the state's legacy network in January was detected before significant damage was done, it inspired a complete network overhaul. The state called upon its local telecommunications provider, GCI Communications, to provide the core wide area network (WAN) services, and McLean, Va.-based Northrop Grumman to upgrade the legacy network with Cisco technology. Already, between 80 percent and 90 percent of the routers and switches have been replaced, and a demilitarized zone (DMZ) was created to restrict network ingress-egress points (i.e., IP addresses) from public access.

In addition, a Cisco Security Agent will consolidate endpoint security functions for all servers and devices to a single source. The solution eliminates the need for updates by relying on behavior analysis, not signature matching, for security.

Taken collectively, the threefold initiative promises to secure Alaska's network end to end. It had been subjected to Trojan-horse programs and bot networks that send spam, launch denial-of-service attacks and stage attacks on other systems.

"Those are potential issues that exist in all networks," says Stan Herrera, Alaska's chief technology officer. "Having people change their passwords while leaving massive open gates inside and outside the network won't do any good."

Herrera expects upgrades to the WAN to be completed by next year, in parallel to the deployment of the security agent. "We have quite a few things happening all at once, but we're going to stop the major bleeding and then work on everything else, most importantly the policies, processes and cultural change associated with security awareness."