The U.S. Defense Department announced on September 10 that it is funding work on new search engine-like software to detect attacks coming from inside a computer system.
Piscataway, New Jersey-based Telcordia Technologies, Inc. (www.telcordia.com), a company which provides flexible, standards-based software and services for IP, wireline, wireless and cable, received a $1.26 million contract to develop the new software. The 18-month agreement is funded by the Arlington, Virginia-based Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Kevin A. Kwiat, program manager at the Rome, New York-based Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate, said that the new search engine-like software is the logical equivalent of a Google search on a computer network to find malicious user activity, and that the technology will focus on detecting an insider attack, which is the most difficult to thwart because the user has already been granted the network privileges that an outsider does not have.
