U.S. Hopes to Strengthen Cyber CapabilitiesNovember 11, 2011
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), hopes to nearly double its 2012 budget for cyber research to help confront growing damage from digital attacks and espionage. The agency, most famously known for funding the creation of the Internet and global positioning devices, submitted a budget request for fiscal 2012 that would raise cyber research funding 73% to $208 million, according to a Reuters report. Currently DARPA spends about 8% of its budget on its cyber efforts, but will boost that to 12% over the next five years, Reuters reported. DARPA "has a special responsibility to explore the outer bounds of such capabilities so that our nation is well prepared for future challenges," Regina Dugan, the agency's director, told a group of computer scientists and hackers at a conference. She noted that the military needs "more and better" methods to confront the growing number of attacks on its networks and computer systems. She also noted that these attacks could soon move from the cyber world to the physical world. For example, car systems controlled by onboard computers could be vulnerable to attacks leading to physical damage. Dugan called on "visionary hackers" and computer scientists to "change the dynamics of cyber defense," according to Reuters. The request for a larger budget comes with the growing realization that defending attacks is far more expensive than launching cyber attacks. For example, DARPA officials noted that it now takes software security packages nearly 10 million lines of code to defence against malware that on average has just 125 lines of code, according to the Reuters report. "This is not to suggest that we stop doing what we are doing in cyber security," Dugan said at the conference, Reuters reported. "But if we continue only down the current path, we will not be able to thwart these attacks effectively.” |
|
