Cybersecurity for U.S. power grid contracts won by Raytheon
NewsDecember 05, 2016
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts. Raytheon won multiple contracts from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to research and develop technologies to detect and respond to cyber attacks on the U.S. power grid infrastructure.
Awarded under the agency's Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization Systems program, the contracts total $9 million.
"During the last two decades, industrial control systems have evolved so that most are now connected to the Internet, making them vulnerable to cyber power grid attack," says 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."
Raytheon BBN experts will develop technologies to improve situational awareness by enabling early warning of an impending attack and detecting adversary spoofing of power grid data collection and communication. These technologies then will also maintain situational awareness in the immediate aftermath of an attack.
Company engineers will also look at methods to maintain secure emergency communication networks following an attack. Raytheon BBN's approach looks to isolate affected organizations from the Internet and then establish a secure emergency network to coordinate power restoration without depending on external networks.
Raytheon BBN Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Raytheon Company.
