DARPA seeking to grow DoD cyber defense

The innovation and research arm of the Department of Defense (DoD) is standing up a new program designed to take a more integrated approach to negating attacks impacting military networks and intelligence.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced Tuesday that its “Cyber Targeted-Attack Analyzer” program would examine data sources across DoD's entire network to help the government better identify threats to national security.

“Traditional approaches to protecting networks involve static cyber firewalls around the network perimeter and patching any discovered holes,” said a release from the agency. “DARPA researchers seek a new approach, one 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.”

The program plans to tackle common challenges in threat intelligence efforts by automatically indexing data sources on networks without human involvement, integrating all data by using a common language for security-related information, and developing tools that have reasoning capabilities.

DARPA is seeking outside contract help, and expects to next month Broad Agency Announcements (BAA) to www.fbo.gov.