In recent years, the emerged network worms and attacks have distributive characteristic, which can spread globally in a very short time. Security management crossing network to co-defense network-wide attacks and improve efficiency of security administration is urgently needed. This paper proposes a hierarchical distributed network security management system (HD-NSMS), which can centrally manage security across networks. First describes the system in macrostructure and microstructure; then discusses three key problems when building HD-NSMS: device model, alert mechanism and emergency response mechanism; at last, describes the implementation of HD-NSMS. The paper is valuable for implementing NSMS in that it derives from a practical network security management system (NSMS).