Threat Countermeasures

“It’s my privilege and honor to christen thee Sea Hunter!” DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar proclaimed, capping the christening ceremony last week for the technology demonstration vessel developed and built through the Agency’s Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program. She then broke a ceremonial “champagne” bottle (the contents were non-alcoholic) against the bow of the prototype ship, in front of approximately 100 guests, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work and senior U.S. Navy and government officials.

The Heartbleed security bug existed in many of the world’s computer systems for nearly two-and-a-half years before it was discovered and a fix circulated in the spring of 2014, by which time it had rendered an estimated half a million of the internet’s secure servers vulnerable to theft and other mischief. And while Heartbleed was in some respects an outlier, long-lived critical flaws in widely deployed bedrock internet infrastructure are not rare.

Capping an intensive three-year push to spark a revolution in automated cyber defense, DARPA today announced that a computer system designed by a team of Pittsburgh-based researchers is the presumptive winner of the Agency’s Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC), the world’s first all-hacking tournament.

DARPA officials this morning released partial final, audited results of yesterday’s all-day Cyber Grand Challenge (CGC) Final Event—the world’s first all-machine cyber hacking tournament—and confirmed that the top-scoring machine was Mayhem, developed by team ForAllSecure of Pittsburgh.

The rapid evolution of small unmanned air systems (sUAS) technologies is fueling the exponential growth of the commercial drone sector, creating new asymmetric threats for warfighters. sUASs’ size and low cost enable novel concepts of employment that present challenges to current defense systems. These emerging irregular systems and concepts of operations in diverse environments require technology advancements to quickly detect, identify, track, and neutralize sUASs while mitigating collateral damage and providing flexibility to operations in multiple mission environments.