Jay Clemens
Raytheon has secured $9 million in contracts to help the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency develop technologies that will work to secure the U.S. power grid system from cyber attacks.
The company said Monday its BBN Technologies subsidiary will design the technologies to send alerts of an impending attack and detect spoofing attempts on grid data collection and communication systems as part of DARPA’s Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization Systems initiative.
The agency intends for RADICS to detect and respond to cyber attacks on the nation’s critical infrastructure, including the parts critical to Defense Department operations.
These systems consist of anomaly detection, planning and automated reasoning, mapping of conventional and industrial control systems networks, ad hoc network formation, industrial control systems protocols analysis and rapid forensic characterization of cyber threats, according to DARPA.
“During the last two decades, industrial control systems have evolved so that most are now connected to the internet, making them vulnerable to cyber attack,” said Jason Redi, vice president for the Raytheon BBN Technologies’ networking and communications unit.
“A significant power disruption would have profound economic and human costs in the U.S, so our goals are to prevent attacks and to reduce the time required to restore power after an attack,†Redi added.
The company will also explore ways to maintain secure emergency communication networks after an attack by isolating affected organizations from the internet and creating an emergency network to restore power.
