Lockheed Martin recently earned Cyber Incident Response Assistance (CIRA) accreditation from the National Security Agency (NSA) Information Assurance Directorate (IAD). CIRA was designed to meet growing cyber protection needs by leveraging the expertise of cyber security industry leaders.

With this accreditation, Lockheed Martin is one of the first federally-recognized companies accredited to help organizations respond to attacks on their networks.

“Serving as one of the first participants for the NSA’s newest incident response initiative and receiving accreditation validates our capabilities and further solidifies our role as an industry leader in the cyber security business,” said Chandra McMahon, Vice President of Commercial Markets for Lockheed Martin’s Information Systems & Global Solutions business.

“Our Intelligence Driven Defense® approach to securing networks, coupled with our extensive experience protecting .mil, .gov, and .com domains, enabled us to meet the rigorous evaluation criteria set forth in this program,” he added.

CIRA is a part of the NSA IAD’s National Security Cyber Assistance Program (NSCAP). NSCAP was formed around the following focus areas: intrusion detection, incident response, vulnerability assessment and penetration testing. The purpose of CIRA is to identify government approved vendors who can provide state-of-the-art Cyber Incident Response Assistance.

To be qualified as a CIRA service provider, Lockheed Martin was evaluated based on its ability to deliver consistent services, to maintain a highly-skilled and qualified staff to deliver cyber incident response services as well as its ability to sustain and improve the quality of cyber incident response services using training and lessons learned.

The evaluation process also included a thorough review of the company’s ability to deliver 21 critical focus areas of incident response assistance services to owners and operators of National Security Systems.