Richard Carr, ITS program manager, holds NASIRC's NASA Group Achievement Award, flanked by NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin (left) and Acting Deputy Administrator John R. Dailey (right).
NASIRC has significantly elevated agency-wide awareness of serious evolving threats to NASA's computer/network systems through on-going threat awareness briefings and in-depth technical workshop sessions and through intercenter communications and cooperation relating to the responsive and timely sharing of incident information and tools and techniques.
The NASIRC "hotline" (1-800-7-NASIRC) allows its customers to report instantly a security incident or threat; and NASIRC's participation in an international forum of incident response teams provides the NASA centers with information on emerging threats and incidents from anywhere in the world in minutes or hours as opposed to days, weeks, or months. Agency-wide benefits from NASIRC's activities have minimized NASA's exposure to significant system disruptions, redundant center activities, dollar loss, and public embarrassment on numerous occasions during the past year when impacts from a single Internet attack or virus infection at multiple centers could have represented dollar losses at a magnitude in the thousands of dollars.
The NASIRC team is a cooperative partnership activity between NASA Headquarters and Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) and consists of civil servants and support contractors. Mr. Richard W. Carr, Headquarters Security Management Office, is the Agency Information Technology Security (ITS) program manager who provides overall direction for the NASIRC. At GSFC Dr. Valerie L. Thomas, Dr. James L. Green, and Henry J. Middleton are the NASIRC project manager, NASIRC deputy project manager, and GSFC ITS manager, respectively. The Hughes STX task leader is Fabion F. Husson.
For more information about NASIRC and its technical services, on-line archives, and automated tools and techniques, please check the NASIRC World Wide Web Home Page (http://nasirc.nasa.gov/).
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Author:Miranda Beall