News & Analysis

Government Security News has announced the finalists and, in some cases, preemptive winners in 45 different categories in GSN’s 2010 Homeland Security Awards Program.

All 45 winner’s trophies will be presented at a gala dinner on the evening of November 8 in Washington, DC, where four star General Barry McCaffrey will receive the GSN 2010 Homeland Security Extraordinary Leadership and Service Award and deliver the keynote speech.

To combat the threat of global, sophisticated cyber-attacks, government security professionals deploy a dizzying array of security technologies. These technologies provide information about network and system events to Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software that collects and analyzes log data to detect attacks.

Every day, people and organizations hand over their most valuable and vital personal information to government agencies. It is then up to the recipient – a federal or state agency, or another government organization – to safely store that data.

China gets blamed for everything these days; sometimes it is warranted and at other times it is not. Regardless of who the actor is, one thing is certain: our adversaries are succeeding at achieving their objectives. With story after story of data breach, intellectual property exfiltration, or Web site compromise, at some point senior managers have to say to themselves, “The current security model is fundamentally broken. How can we fix it?”

The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979 opened the door that had been closed since 1258, when the Mongols destroyed Baghdad, the political and cultural center of the Muslim Abbasid dynasty. It gave the Muslim fundamentalists an opportunity to finally make their cause a global call for justice and unite the Muslims throughout the world into one unified group, the “Umma.”

As a group of women streamed out of a conference room at the Farragut Center, in Washington, DC, Soraya Correa, the Director of Procurement and Operations for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, found herself deep in conversation with a small group of women. That’s no surprise because the organizer of the event, Women in Homeland Security, had just hosted Correa for one of its monthly luncheons.

SafeNet prides itself in anticipating changes in the marketplace.

Rather than spending time analyzing where the data protection and encryption market finds itself today, Chris Fedde, SafeNet’s president and chief operating officer, says he and his company’s inner circle, spend their time thinking about where the market is heading two years from now.

On a warm, sunny day last January, two terrorists flew into Israel on a commercial airliner. One of them checked into a Tel Aviv hotel, and was found dead in his room about 20 hours later, apparently from the devastating effects of a biological agent that Israeli physicians were unable to identify.

Meanwhile, the second terrorist carried the same bio-agent to a nearby sports stadium and attempted to “aerosolize” the deadly agent so it could attack – and perhaps kill – thousands of spectators.

“They only fear you when you have a gun and when you, when you start killing them… We’ll start doing killing here, if I can’t do it over there.”

These chilling words came from the mouth of Mohamed Mahmood Alessa, one of two New Jersey men recently arrested and charged with attempting to go overseas and fight with Somali-based Al Qaeda affiliate al-Shabaab.

More than 50 executives from leading homeland security companies gathered at a Lockheed Martin conference center in Crystal City, VA, on June 3 to bemoan the current relationship between senior DHS officials and the homeland security industry, to try to understand the frustrating situation, and to search for ways to improve communications between government decision makers and private sector executives.