HERNDON, Va., Sept. 12, 2000 (PRIMEZONE) -- A team led by Logicon Inc., a Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC) company, has become the first to successfully demonstrate real-time information recovery and response during a simulated information warfare attack on a deployed Department of Defense battle management system.
The demonstration took place this summer as part of the Data Resiliency in Information Warfare (DRIW) program, a study sponsored by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y.
Traditionally, information warfare defense has focused on security - keeping intruders outside of a system's firewalls through physical security, passwords, encryption and access cards. Maintaining this type of security has become more difficult due to the increasingly sophisticated nature of information warfare attacks, greater interconnectivity of computer networks and costs.
Information resiliency assumes that intruders will break into a network, but applies various methods to limit the damage they can cause.
"The Logicon team has focused on two unique areas - forecasting an attack and responding in real-time immediately after an attack," said Dennis McCallam, a member of Logicon's senior technical staff. "Our work enables the user to either forestall an attack or react rapidly to it, and re-establish the system's operations with minimal or no impact to the end user."
"DRIW is specifically designed to protect battle management and command and control systems," said Joe Giordano, program manager, U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. "Logicon's team is the only real-time recovery solution that has been successfully demonstrated."
Logicon's teammates on the DRIW program are Northrop Grumman Corporation's Electronic Sensors and Systems Sector, Baltimore, Md.; Modus Operandi, Indialantic, Fla., and the Center for Secure Information Systems at George Mason University, Fairfax, Va.
DRIW is also the first time Program 5 of the National Plan for Information Systems Protection has been achieved. The objective of Program 5 is to create a capability in information systems for response, reconstitution and recovery. The first public demonstration of DRIW will be held Sept. 14 at the InfowarCon 2000 conference in Washington, D.C. InfowarCon is produced by MIS Training Institute and Interpact Inc.
"InfowarCon has always been at the cutting edge of policy, procedure and technology for information warfare and infrastructure protection," said Winn Schwartau, president of Interpact and founder of InfowarCon. "We are certainly honored that Logicon has chosen InfowarCon to demonstrate DRIW, the first activity to achieve the objectives of Program 5."
Logicon is a leader in advanced information technologies, systems and services. Areas of expertise include command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR); information systems; training and simulation; science and technology; base and range support; and commercial information services.
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