US intelligence needs a system to predict cyber attacks

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) of the United States invites private companies and research centers to participate in the development of a program that could predict cybercrime and hacker attacks. As planned by the Office, the system should automatically track Internet activity, which would indicate the planning and preparation of attacks.

Among the data sources are social networks, news, chat rooms, blogs, message boards, search queries, and other sources (perhaps large cryptocurrency transactions). Despite the obvious connection of the field of the proposed system with data that ECHELON and PRISM illegally collect, it is reported that the project development companies will not be given access to the NSA data. It is possible that the National Security Agency plans in the future to abandon illegal wiretaps if the new system shows good results, working only with public data.


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IARPA (Agency for Advanced Intelligence Research) will be in charge of the development of the system - an analogue of DARPA, but not with a military theme, but with an emphasis on research and the processing of “big data”. The Agency’s budget and projects are for the most part classified. The IARPA subdivision called “Survey for Surprises” will be directly involved in the development.



The system offers to call CAUSE (Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment, the environment for non-standard automated cyber attack detectors). The mission of the project, designed for 3-5 years, judging by the presentation : “to invest in high-risk and highly profitable research that could potentially give US intelligence a huge advantage over their enemies.” CAUSE will have to automatically predict instances of unauthorized access to data, DOS attacks, the introduction of malicious code and a system scan to find entry points.


Person of Interest