USTRANSCOM Wins National Security Agency award

SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. – The U.S. Transportation Command has again received an award from the National Security Agency for providing outstanding information systems security.

More than 130 workers from USTRANSCOM’s Command, Control, Communications, and Cyber Systems Directorate and the Joint Cyber Center were responsible for the command receiving first place honors in the NSA Frank B. Rowlett award program. The competition included organizations from throughout the U.S. government.

The NSA established the Information Systems Security National Awards in 1989 to recognize outstanding organizational and individual excellence in the field of information systems security.

Today these annual awards, named in honor of crypto-logic pioneer Frank B. Rowlett, recognize significant contributions to the information assurance discipline.

The Rowlett Award program recognizes individual and organizational one-time or long-term achievement in the improvement of national information systems security, information assurance readiness, or defensive information operations.

TRANSCOM members in Operations and Plans (J3), Intelligence and Command (J2), Command Control, Communications and Cyber Systems (J6) directorates, as well as liaison officers from NSA and U.S. Cyber Command comprised the winning team.

“The award is not only for Department of Defense workers,” said Scott Maberry, an NSA IA (Information Assurance) liaison officer.  “This is a government-wide award, open to anyone in the federal government.”

According to Maberry, in order for an organization to be considered for the award, an organization must exhibit the ability to identify and solve significant IA problems, threats, or vulnerabilities; show mission accomplishments and successes at the organizational level resulting from the application of IA; provide a significant contribution to the elements or the nation's IA posture.

In part, the citation which accompanied the award of the 2011 Rowlett Award reads:

            The USTRANSCOM team developed a secure construct for integrating 26 programs into             a hardened enclave with a common security boundary, which will reduce the cyber      battle space to be defended, shorten incident response cycle times, and produce a cost     avoidance of approximately 115 million dollars over 5 years. The team utilized defensive    cyber operations in support of Middle East operations and pioneered new defensive             technologies for DoD.

USTRANSCOM also placed first in the Rowlett Award program in 1997, 2000 and 2003 and runner up five other years since the competition’s inception.

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