From: Government Security News
By: Mark Rockwell
Defense department researchers are looking for new ways to defend sprawling communications and data networks from targeted assault.
The Department of Defense’s (DoD) network, said Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) follows DoD personnel across the globe collecting, transferring and processing information in forms as diverse as data warehouses, in-the-field mobile devices and mission computers on board F-18’s. The network, said DARPA, is also constantly changing in size and shape as new missions are undertaken and new technology is deployed. In military terms, that means the cyber terrain of the DoD network is constantly shifting, it said.
The research group wants help looking beyond the more traditional network security approaches, like static cyber firewalls around the network perimeter and patching any discovered holes. It said its researchers seek a new approach that relies on knowing the cyber terrain within the network and understanding how information across the enterprise is connected to find actions associated with an attack buried under or within all the normal data.
DARPA said its new Cyber Targeted-Attack Analyzer program will attempt to automatically correlate all of a network’s disparate data sources—even those that are as large and complex as those within the DoD — to understand how information is connected as the network grows, shifts and changes.
The agency said it anticipates posting a solicitation for the program to www.fbo.gov within the next month.
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