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Enterprise All-Stars: Honoring 50 companies and their groundbreaking network projects

Government All-Stars

Whether taming unruly application use, improving communications or beefing up security, these five government projects have two things in common. They must integrate with incredibly large and complex environments, and in these fiscally delicate times, they must be able to prove hard-dollar monetary value.
By Deb Radcliff , Network World , 11/21/2005
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Government All-Stars
Mine Safety and Health Administration | Defense Information Systems Agency | Lee County Sheriff's Office | South Carolina Department of Revenue | U.S. Coast Guard Operations Systems Center

Mining SIM

Security information management helps the Mine Safety and Health Administration boost its security score from F to B.

In late 2004, a version of the Welchia worm hit the Mine Safety and Health Administration network, its ping of death disabling 17 remote offices in an hour. That's when George Fesak knew he had made the right decision to invest in security information management (SIM).

"It took less than three hours to block the Welchia traffic, quarantine the 298 infected machines and restore connections to our 17 field offices," says Fesak, who is director for Program Evaluation and Information Resources (PEIR) at MSHA, a U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) agency in Arlington, Va. "Right there was the ROI. I remember when ILOVEU tore through here without SIM in place. It took us four or five days to get our people back to work."

Using netForensics' nFX Open Security Platform, MSHA security engineers and network administrators can see security events as they unfold, changing security configurations. The system integrated with MSHA's intrusion-detection systems, firewalls, routers and SSL VPN devices to take network event information for analysis and correlation. Using nFX wizards to create agents for MSHA's critical business servers, administrators created role-based connectivity for departments requiring access. In this way, the security, operations and applications groups can get correlated intelligence on the gathered data as needed.

Fesak credits much of MSHA's success to Syed Hafeez, information systems security officer for the agency. Since 2001, Hafeez has worked with the organizational business units to raise awareness and involve the business in structural security upgrades. In March 2003, Hafeez undertook the SIM project, completing Phase I (security device integration) and Phase II (server integration) in October that year.

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