Northrop Joins With Academics For Cybersecurity Work
December 01 2009 - 11:36AM
Dow Jones News
Northrop Grumman Corp.(NOC) is joining with several U.S.
universities in a consortium to address near and long-term Internet
security.
The Los Angeles company will invest millions of dollars a year
for the next five years, and likely beyond, to partner with
Carnegie Mellon University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
and Purdue University to find ways to secure computer hardware,
software and systems that support information sharing around the
globe.
At a press conference Tuesday, which was webcast, Robert
Brammer, chief technology officer of Northrop Grumman Information
Systems, said each institution will work on several projects that
play to its strengths in cybersecurity research. Revenue and
patents resulting from the work would go to the institution, or
Northrop, or be split, according to how the work is done, according
to mutual agreements.
Northrop is a major provider of cybersecurity support for U.S.
defense and intelligence, and to civil governments in the U.S. and
elsewhere. Brammer said the collaboration will speed up research
with ideas that can be incorporated in contracts coming up soon as
well as explore pro-active ways to protect information in the
public and private sectors.
Security problems are growing as global Internet use is expected
to increase 10 times to 15 times by 2015, Brammer said.
The group didn't discuss specific Internet security breaches
that have been in the news this year, including hacked information
on the Joint Strike Fighter, the Pentagon's biggest defense
program.
Gene Spafford, head of the center for education and research in
information assurance at Purdue, said warnings on Internet security
have been ignored for decades.
"Problems have only been addressed after they've occurred. They
could have been prevented," he said.
Adrian Perrig, a professor at Carnegie Mellon, said the Internet
gives users the freedom to use any name they want, making them hard
to track. But he said technology now exists to identify hackers by
backtracking groups of IP packets, or segments of digital
information traveling on the Internet, to a source.
Computers don't know right from wrong, said Howard Shrode, a top
computer scientist at MIT: "The solution is to tell the computer
more about what it is doing in real time." He said that developing
"meta data" gives computer hardware the ability to block
information.
The Obama administration this year said protecting the nation's
computer networks is a top economic and national security priority.
Analysts expect that some $30 billion will be spent on Internet
security initiatives. That's in addition to security costs already
embedded in government IT contracts.
For investors, analyst Howard Rubel at Jeffries & Company
said it may be hard to get a handle on specific technology
breakthroughs, because they could tip the hands of hackers.
Still, government cybersecurity contracts will be awarded; at
the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates is keen to hire some
smaller niche contractors, which in some cases could unseat bigger
incumbents, said Scott Sacknoff, who manages the SPADE Index of
Defense stocks. For small companies, a single contract might mean a
lot more to the bottom line than it would to Northrop Grumman and
its peers, he said.
Some possible winners include CACI International Inc. (CACI),
SAIC, Inc. (SAI), and Symantec Corp. (SYMC), Cogent (COGT) and
Stanley Associates (SXE).
-By Ann Keeton; Dow Jones Newswires; 312-750-4120;
ann.keeton@dowjones.com
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