Companies pitch products to government agencies WASHINGTON — Homeland security is a hot topic in the halls of the U.S. Congress lately, so it should be no surprise that a variety of technology vendors were pitching their homeland security connections at a huge government and technology trade show in Washington this week.Forty vendors camped out in the new homeland security pavilion at the FOSE trade show, which runs from Tuesday through Thursday, and Ron Rubens, a partner in technology training company Intense School, said interest in his company’s monthly offerings of a Certified Information Systems Security Professional training classes in the Washington area has been steadily increasing in the last year. A total of 450 vendors exhibited at FOSE, up from 400 last year.“It’s sold out all the time,” Rubens said while manning the Intense School booth in the FOSE homeland security pavilion. “The government’s spending money on security training. That’s why we’re at the show. Well, everybody’s spending money on security training.” Rubens’ company offers private training sessions as well as its open classes, and U.S. agencies such as the Department of Defense have hired the company for those private classes.The recent attitude among customers, both in and outside of government, is that security certifications are a higher priority right now than new equipment or software, Rubens claimed. The attitude is, “let’s make sure we’re safe,” he said.While Rubens was pitching security training, companies like Northrop Grumman and Intellitactics were pitching full-fledged network security monitoring suites aimed at government agencies. Paul Sop, chief technology officer for Intellitactics, talked up his company’s Network Security Manager “integrated threat management platform,” by saying it evaluates all threats to a customer’s network and picks out “the needle in the haystack,” the few threats that actually have the potential to do some real damage. The product’s graphical user interface will “explain what the threats are in English,” Sop said. “We pull out the things that are lost in the haze.”Sop said the company has sold its network monitoring software to a handful of U.S. government agencies, including the Army. Several others he couldn’t disclose.Perry Luzwick, director of business development for mission support systems at Northrop Grumman Information Technology, said his company plans to release a comprehensive network security suite within a few months. The suite will gather several of Northrop Grumman’s security products into one package, including an intrusion detection product, and encryption product and a strategic warning system, and will be aimed at both government agencies and corporations. “Electrons and photons don’t know any borders,” Luzwick said of his company’s plan to pitch the product to a variety of government agencies and corporations.As recently as Tuesday, members of the U.S. House Committee on Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental Relations and the Census questioned why many government agencies are still getting failing cybersecurity grades from Congress. While witnesses at that hearing blasted President George W. Bush’s administration for lax cybersecurity planning, Luzwick laid the blame on Congress, which controls the purse strings.While pockets of strong cybersecurity exist in the U.S. government, Luzwick said, for most agencies, the “funding isn’t there.” Even vendors that would seem to have little to do with homeland security were pitching such products at FOSE. Zebra Technologies International LLC, a maker of product-labeling printers, is hoping to get contracts from the departments of Defense and Homeland Security for printing and programming “smart” identification cards that include biometrics information as well as photographs and other identifying information.Those smart cards could then be used to gain access to a military base, or give a base grocery store worker the authority to purchase butter but not guns, said Timothy McGilloway, Zebra’s director of government sales for bar codes and cards. Zebra’s smart card printer costs $6,600, and smart cards cost between $3 and $20, he added, but the increased focus on security both inside and outside of government is driving up interest for smart cards for several uses, including entrance ID cards for apartment complexes.“The government is way ahead of the commercial end of the business,” McGilloway said of the use of smart cards. “People in the past were highly resistant because of the cost.” The Defense Department is already using Zebra printers to label military equipment headed to Iraq, McGilloway said, complete with bar codes that tell scanners what military units each piece of equipment belongs to. “It’s a bit like the FedEx for the military,” he said of the military equipment tracking system.More information about FOSE is at http://www.fose.com Security