DHS to partner with industry to protect cyberspace.

A National Cyber Security Summit is being planned for this fall to bring together industry and government representatives to work on efforts to prevent disabling attacks on the Internet such as the Blaster and SoBig worms that attacked computers this summer.

The summit is one of several measures that the National Cyber Security Division of the Department of Homeland Security has undertaken to protect government, industry and personal computer systems.

Testifying before the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science, and Research & Development, Robert Liscouski, assistant secretary for infrastructure protection and acting director for the national cyber security division, said the growing reliance on the Internet is compelling the government to create partnerships.

"With nearly all of the backbone of cyberspace owned by the private sector, it is imperative that the NCSD strengthen its relationship with them," he said.

The NCSD already has begun shoring up its relationship with the private sector. In August, when the Blaster worm began to surface on the Internet, NCSD issued warnings to security professionals suggesting specific steps they could take, including shutting down Internet service providers to block the spread of the infection, Liscouski said.

Working with Internet security researchers, private industry and academia, the NCSD and the FBI were able to uncover a code embedded within the SoBig worm that was programmed to launch a denial of service attack, Liscouski said.

"Federal authorities located the 20 computers infected with this variant of the worm and asked their ISPs to shut down their Internet access," he said. "As a consequence, the second wave of the attacks never materialized."

The NCSD plans to continue its cooperation with industry, academia and the government to ensure that a potentially more serious infection doesn't cause irreversible damage, he said.

The effort has led to the planned summit, Liscouski said.

Key goals of the meeting are: to produce a common threat reporting protocol; develop a vulnerability reduction initiative; create a public outreach program; and formulate and ratify a National Cyber Security road map that would raise the bar of cyber security across the country and identify work stream leads from both government and industry, Liscouski said.

NCSD is looking to create, in coordination with the Office of Personnel Management and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, cyber security awareness and education programs along with partnerships with consumers, businesses, governments, academia and international communities, he said.

Liscouski also announced that the Cyber Security Tracking Analysis and Response Center (CSTARC) has become the U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team.

"This initiative will harness this massive capability to significantly increase America's ability to protect against, and respond to, a massive scale cyber attacks," he said.

More than 200 private and public sector groups and universities operate CERT teams.

"We view the US-CERT as a fundamental element of the DHS strategy to ensure timely notification of all types of attacks, working toward having, within a year, an average of a 30-minute response to any attack," Liscouski said.