The DHS plans to collocate private-sector employees from the communications and IT industries with government workers at the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) facility here, said Gregory Garcia, assistant secretary of cybersecurity and telecommunications at the DHS. The teams will work jointly on improving US-CERT's information hub for cybersecurity, Garcia said. The agency didn't specify a starting date for the program but said it will begin soon.

US-CERT is a four-year-old DHS-run joint effort of the public and private sectors to protect the nation's Internet infrastructure. "It's through this collocation that we are going to build a strong trust relationship, an information-sharing relationship," said Garcia.

Such collaboration programs will improve the monitoring of Internet activity "so we will be able to better analyze [in] real time what is happening and take steps to mitigate it and have a synchronized and instantaneous response capability," he said.

Garcia outlined the efforts to improve cooperation between the public and private sectors at the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association's Homeland Security Conference held here this week.

Garcia andother speakers at the conference said that the need to improve such cooperation, as well as the need to improve IT security overall, is becoming more urgent daily. "What we are seeing among our adversaries is increasing sophistication in terms of their capabilities, in terms of the threats that they impose upon our networks," Garcia said.