International Boundary and Water Commission

October 3, 2018

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AITHERAS provides the International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC), a sub-agency of the U.S. Department of State, with a custom-tailored approach to addressing their security operations, management, monitoring, and compliance needs.

Through our cutting-edge virtual security operations center (VSOC), AITHERAS provides Continuous Security Monitoring (CSM), Vulnerability Modeling (VM), and Managed Security Services to IBWC to achieve 24/7, around-the-clock security monitoring, while reducing security costs and meeting FISMA and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) compliance requirements.

IBWC is a federal agency that applies the boundary and water treaties of the United States and Mexico, and settles differences that may arise in their application. The organization is spread over 15 different locations across the southern border, and manages several critical national infrastructures to include the water treatment plant for the city of Nogales. The primary mission of the agency includes the following:

  • Regulation and conservation of the waters of the Rio Grande for their use by the two countries by joint construction, operation, and maintenance of international storage dams and reservoirs, and plants for generating hydroelectric energy at the dams

  • Protection of lands along the river from floods by levee and floodway projects

  • Border sanitation solutions and other quality problems pertaining to water

  • Preservation of the Rio Grande and Colorado River as the international boundary

  • Demarcation of the land boundary

AITHERAS’ expert team uses our robust suite of tools to manage and monitor the security of IBWC’s edge devices (firewalls and IDSs) at all endpoints, and the existing McAfee Nitro SIEM, to help them achieve FISMA regulatory compliance through the continuous collection, analysis, and diagnosis of threat and vulnerability data.

OUR SERVICE OFFERING FOR IBWC INCLUDES:

Firewall/IDS Management and Monitoring

  • 24/7/365 centralized management service via the VSOC

  • 24/7/365 monitoring, alerting and incident response via the VSOC

  • Continuous Security Monitoring

  • Current state security best practice assessment

  • Implementation/configuration of all devices as required

  • Ongoing updates, upgrades, changes and enhancements

Log Management and Alerting

  • 24/7/365 Service via AITHERAS Team’s Continuous Security Monitoring (CSM)

  • Analysis, alerting and incident response

  • Security-focused enhancement of McAfee Nitro instances covering 300 nodes

  • Integration of McAfee-based Nitro datafeeds with advanced AITHERAS CSM analytics

AITHERAS also provides FISMA remediation services, supporting IBWC government leads when working with auditors to resolve any FISMA requirement gaps, and has developed and implemented a full upgrade of the IBWC Nogales SCADA solution.