DARPA seeks plans for tackling malicious cyber campaigns

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is tackling malicious cyber campaigns through its Enhanced Attrition program.

DARPA released a broad agency announcement with an aim to deal with criminal cyber actions and the people behind those actions. The agency wants high-fidelity visibility into all aspects of these cyber operators’ and increase the government’s ability to publicly reveal their actions without damaging its sources and how it was accomplished

The program will develop techniques and tools to get relevant information about concurrent independent cyber campaigns, such as operators, and how to share the information with any number of interested parties.

DAPRA plans for three task areas. First, DARPA will make one award for behavior and activity tracking and summarization efforts. It will include techniques for tracking cyber operators from various vantage points toward characterizing the individual behavior and cyber-relevant actions.

Secondly, DAPRA will make multiple awards for fusion and predictive analysis. The contracts will fuse information generated by the behavior tracking and summarization technology to create an up-to-date knowledge base for each malicious cyber operators.

Lastly, DARPA will make multiple awards for validation and enrichment. The goal is to broaden the knowledge base to complement the behavioral technology data in order to get wider picture of malicious activity and identifying weaknesses in the operators’ tools and infrastructure.

DARPA made its announcement April 22. Responses are due by June 7.