The Defense Department plans to ratchet up cyber security over the next five years, say chatter from a conference its research arm, DARPA, held on Monday. DARPA is seeking $208 million in funding to “prepare for hostile cyber acts that threaten our military capabilities,” an increase in $83 million reports Information Week. At the “cyber colloquium” in Virginia on Monday, talking heads for the DoD waxed poetic about the issues the Pentagon faces with cyber security.
“It is the makings of novels and poetry from Dickens to Gibran that the best and the worst occupy the same time, that wisdom and foolishness appear in the same age, light and darkness in the same season,” said DARPA’s director Regina Dugan, Wired reports. Former White House Security chief Richard Clarke was more blunt, saying current networks are as “porous as a colande.” Meanwhile, Wired reports DARPA also tacitly reached out to hackers at the colloquium, looking to enlist “the efforts of technical experts at unprecedented levels, including at the development of policy and legal frameworks.”
In addition to spending more money and enlisting the help of hackers, DARPA plans to employ a digital disinformation campaign against newer would-be Wikileakers. Fox News reports the DoD is looking to develop a system which would identify “malicious insiders” who might seek to reveal confidential information. An abstract for an awarded solicitation revealed a program that would give out fake information and then track its disseminators. “We want to flood adversaries with information that’s bogus, but looks real,” said a professor leading the project.
