Dan Verton

When Vance Hitch took over as CIO at the U.S. Department of Justice 18 months ago, he found a variety of applications running on different systems that were hampered by little or no integration.

You can deploy all of the firewalls and intrusion-detection devices money can buy to protect your network from hackers and malicious code, but when it comes to truly knowing what's happening on your network, there's no substitute for digging through system log files.

Two years after terrorists killed 3,000 people, the government and the private sector are still struggling to define priorities for the security of the nation's critical infrastructure and to turn those priorities into real systems and programs.

Antivirus researchers late Wednesday discovered what is being described as the first of potentially many "9/11" anniversary viruses spreading on the Internet.

President George W. Bush plans to appoint Karen Evans, CIO at the Department of Energy and an experienced government IT professional, to become the new head of the administration's e-government initiatives, the White House announced Wednesday.

Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge recently said the administration

Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge Tuesday said the administration's layered security strategy, which combines new technologies with a restructured homeland security organization and streamlined processes, has made the nation significantly more secure than at any other time since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

After 16 months of development and testing, a public/private security partnership based in Oregon Wednesday officially activated what is being described as the nation's first fully automated, Web-based regional security alert system.