Defense contractor Raytheon announced this week that it has been awarded a $9.8 million contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as part of its ‘Plan X‘ program.
Plan X is a five-year $110 million foundational cyberwarfare program to develop platforms for the Department of Defense (DoD) to plan for, conduct and assess cyberwarfare in a manner similar to kinetic warfare. As a DARPA research program, Plan X has a goal of creating an advanced map that details the billions of devices connected to the Internet so that military commanders can identify, and if necessary, disable targets.
“Raytheon’s research and development is focused on enabling the Department of Defense to predictably and rapidly scale and execute cyber operations with accurate assessable results,” the company said in a statement.
“When supporting our customers’ missions, we can help assess the results of launching missiles or any weapons in other domains—land, air, sea or space,” said Jack Harrington, vice president of Cybersecurity and Special Missions within Raytheon Intelligence, Information and Services. “Raytheon is working to provide the same mission confidence to the cyber domain through our work with DARPA’s Plan X.”
In December 2013, Raytheon announced the opening of a new cyber facility in San Antonio, Texas, the latest of 21 cyber facilities the company operates in five countries.
Raytheon also announced on Dec. 16 that its BBN Technologies subsidiary is working on a program under Plan X designed to help U.S. government agencies “plan, execute and assess cyber network operations”. As part of that project, Raytheon BBN is developing network mapping and graph analysis technologies fuled by a $6 million DARPA contract.
“Plan X is an entirely new approach for planning and executing cyber operations,” Dr. Jack Marin, vice president for cyber security at Raytheon BBN said in December. “It is a comprehensive program designed to provide easy-to-use cyber operations planning tools to users who may not have a deep background in cyber.”