In order to determine ways to fend off or prevent attacks on the internet, DARPA is hoping to have their scale model of the internet ready sometime next year for testing:
The US defence agency that invented the forerunner to the internet is working on a “virtual firing range” intended as a replica of the real internet so scientists can mimic international cyberwars to test their defences.
Called the National Cyber Range, the system will be ready by next year and will also help the Pentagon to train its own hackers and refine their skills to guard US information systems, both military and domestic.
The move marks another rise in the temperature of the online battlefield. The US and Israel are believed to have collaborated on a sophisticated piece of malware called Stuxnet that targeted computers controlling Iran’s nuclear centrifuge scheme. Government-authorised hackers in China, meanwhile, are suspected to have been behind a number of attacks on organisations including the International Monetary Fund, French government and Google.
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Darpa is also working on other plans to advance the US’s cyber defences. A program known as Crash — for Clean-slate design of Resilient, Adaptive, Secure Hosts — seeks to design computer systems that evolve over time, making them harder for an attacker to target.
The Cyber Insider Threat program, or Cinder, would help monitor military networks for threats from within by improving detection of threatening behaviour from people authorised to use them. The problem has loomed large since Bradley Manning allegedly passed confidential state department documents to WikiLeaks, the anti-secrecy website.
Another is a Cyber Genome, aimed at automating the discovery, identification and characterisation of malicious code. That could help figure out who was behind a cyber-strike.
