‘Know the Enemy’: DARPA Develops Simulation to Thwart Cyber Attacks

Sun Tzu The great Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu observed, “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.” This appears to the thinking behind the US Defense Advanced Research Agency’s (DARPA) new National Cyber Range (NCR) program. DARPA is teaming with industry to develop technologies that will enable US personnel to simulate attacks on the USA’s cyber networks, which include most IT and computer systems as well as the infrastructure that depends on those systems, and devise strategies to thwart those attacks. By constructing advanced simulations, DARPA hopes the NCR will enable US defenders to anticipate attackers moves and outthink the enemy. DARPA began the program in January 2009 with the award of 7 contracts for phase I NCR development; the agency recently awarded contracts for phase II… National Cyber Testbed According to DARPA, the NCR [pdf] will test technologies such as host security systems, and local and wide area network (LAN and WAN) security tools and suites by integrating, replicating or simulating them. The NCR will provide a large-scale Global Information Grid (GIG) infrastructure, where technologies and systems can be analyzed and tested under real world conditions in current […]