Communications of the ACM
Meet the Fed's First Line of Defense Against Cyber Attacks
The first line of cyberdefense for the U.S. Federal Reserve is the National Incident Response Team.
Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The U.S. Federal Reserve's first line of defense against cyberattacks is the National Incident Response Team (NIRT), which includes about 100 closely monitored employees who sift through the Fed's networks daily looking for indications of hacking.
NIRT's sensors are so sensitive that if a Fed employee at any of the system's 12 regional U.S. banks links an unauthorized device to his work computer, NIRT will be notified and, if necessary, seize the computer and run forensic tests on it, according to a former NIRT member.
A NIRT representative told the U.S. Inspector General the team's primary services include security monitoring, forensic analysis of traffic flows and attempted cyberattacks, and alerts and warnings about potential dangers. NIRT also is tasked with warning Fed employees about malware they have found on the Internet and hacking methods attackers might use.
NIRT mainly operates from the East Rutherford Operations Center in New Jersey, while NIRT's forensic analysts work at the Fed's New York branch. Former NIRT employees also say a team committed to developing network penetration techniques to defend the central bank's own systems is based at the San Francisco Fed branch.
NIRT is on the lookout for experts who can reverse-engineer malware, analyze traffic flows, execute "post mortem" examinations of compromised computers, and devise defensive security techniques on the fly.
From Foreign Policy
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