GSA seeks tools, services to monitor government nets

The General Services Administration is seeking vendors qualified to set up and manage hardware and software to monitor civilian agency networks for security breaches, the agency announced today.

The project, being managed by the GSA Federal Technology Service's Office of Information Security, aims to build a full intrusion-detection system that will enable agencies to identify and collect information on external attacks on federal information technology resources, according to a notice published in Commerce Business Daily. The program initially will focus on identifying external attacks on agency systems.

Under GSA's plan, information collected by the system will be transmitted almost immediately to a central analysis facility in the Washington, D.C., area.