Military Spends $4.4M To Supersize Net Monitoring

coondoggie writes "Bigger, better, faster, more are the driving themes behind the advanced network monitoring technology BBN Technologies is building for the military. The high-tech firm got a $4.4 million contract today from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop novel, scalable attack detection algorithms; a flexible and expandable architecture for implementing and deploying the algorithms; and an execution environment for traffic inspection and algorithm execution. The network monitoring system is being developed under DARPA's Scalable Network Monitoring program which seeks to bolt down network security in the face of cyber attacks that have grown more subtle and sophisticated."

Sounds cheap for the job

[Sun Chi]

The article doesn't say, but it seems logical that they would want the US military network to be able to handle both an attack like the one launched earlier this year against Georgia's internet infrastructure (likely by Russia) and the almost-certainly Russian-based one during actual armed conflict this week.

DoD has a budget of about $439.3 billion and DARPA gets $3.2 billion of that (according to Wikipedia). $4.4 million doesn't sound like that much out of that kind of budget, but I'd be interested in what they actually come up with. Doubt the general public will see anything created by this project for at least 10 years, though.

Re:Interesting

[Darkness404]

Yes *A* Mac virus, compare that with the *thousands* of current Windows viruses. Sure there is probably even *A* Linux virus or even *A* Plan9 virus, but most viruses are written for Windows and the fact that there are like 1 current virus for alternate OSes isn't as bad as the *thousands* of Windows ones.

Re:Encryption

[nurb432]

There goes 90% of the internet today then.

Even 'knowledgeable' sites like /. haven't stepped up to the plate yet.

At least my side of the email traffic is, but pretty sure the other side isn't, since people still don't understand.