DARPA signs $4.7 million cyberhunting contract with Perspecta Labs
NewsOctober 02, 2018
CHANTILLY, Va. Perspecta Inc. research arm Perspecta Labs has obtained a prime contract from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to support the Cyber-Hunting at Scale (CHASE) program.
The goal of the CHASE program, say Perspecta Lab officials, is to develop dynamic real-time tools that can successfully defend large-scale, distributed networks from broad-spectrum cyberthreats.
“This new work builds on Perspecta Labs' research experience, technology expertise and implementation capabilities on past cyber work with DARPA,” said Petros Mouchtaris, Ph.D., president of Perspecta Labs. “We look forward to working closely with DARPA on this critical work to harden distributed networks.”
Under the terms of the contract, Perspecta Labs will develop, demonstrate, and evaluate data-driven cyberhunting tools that work in real time, at scale, and across multiple enterprise networks.
In particular, the company plans to design and develop what it calls WILEE, a set of components for threat detection and characterization, that will accelerate the hunt process by translating high-level threat descriptions into possible concrete implementations using a variety of sophisticated analytic techniques, including adversarial planning, genetic perturbation, and data-driven evaluation. As envisioned, WILEE will automatically prioritize hunt activities, inform data collection, minimize detection time, and detect both known and novel malicious activities with a high level of confidence.
The new four-year contract has a base value of $4.7 million, not including options.
