Coast Guard cyberdefense office: small but mighty.

• Author: Beidel, Eric
• Position: Coast Guard

* Like the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, the Coast Guard suffers thousands of attacks on its networks each month.

The Army has some 21,000 personnel devoted to network defense.

The Coast Guard: just 18.

Coast Guard Cyber Command, which is still in its infancy and awaiting a final stamp of approval, has aspirations to carry out a variety of missions. As a force that straddles the law enforcement and military' realms, it is in a unique position, its leaders say.

'We're smack dab in the middle of this," says Coast Guard Lt. H. "Lars" McCarter, who is now assigned to a tactics branch at U.S. Cyber Command.

Officials say the threat to the Coast Guard is real. In late 2009, the service suffered the largest ever intrusion of its unclassified network. Dozens of systems were affected, some in geographically remote locations. There is a high probability that the attackers were able to exhilarate sensitive information to foreign locations, though the initial source of the hack remains unknown, officials say.

But there are currently more Coast Guard personnel being funded by the Defense Department and assigned to U.S. Cyber Command in Fort Meade, Md., than there are back at the service's own operation in Washington, D.C. McCarter is one of 20 from the small service currently focused on carrying out the Pentagon's cyberspace mission. They will return to the Coast Guard when they finish their assignments, but there may or may not be space for them in network security roles.

The 18 personnel that currently make up Coast Guard Cyber Command come from a variety' of information technology', operational and intelligence backgrounds and have a tall order ahead of them. In addition to defending their networks and protecting more than 45,000 workstations and users, they plan to use the Internet to keep tabs on drug runners and other criminals and keep critical infrastructure at the nation's ports running safely. The service would like to beef up the command to carry out these missions, but potential budget cuts could put a damper on some of these efforts.

The Coast Guard already takes advantage of network security and intelligence training offered by other services and had to cut spending on other programs just to carve out the 18-person detachment. The chronically underfunded service is likely to have to trim some more in the current fiscal environment.

"I think what we find with cyber is that it's more expensive to ignore it than to deal with it,"...