The IBM is working with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration to develop a security system that uses advanced analytics to correlate and analyze data in order to detect and prevent cyber-attacks.
IBM is working with the U.S. Federal
Aviation Administration to develop a prototype security system utilizing
advanced analytics to stop cyber-attacks.
The research project will use streaming analytics in an effort to enable the
FAA to better correlate and analyze data. According to an IBM
statement March 30, the system will "look retrospectively at event
occurrences and system compromises ... to correlate historical traffic patterns
with data from monitors, sensors and other devices capturing information about
network traffic and user activity in real time."
IBM said it also plans to build
customizable dashboards that can "deliver up-to-the-second
information on the security posture of the FAA networks. These dashboards
will give FAA officials visual representations of network workloads, tickets
for found malware and historical trends to facilitate decision making and early
action in the event of network anomalies suggesting a possible attack."
"Basically, we are getting information overload," FAA spokesperson
Paul Takemoto told eWEEK. "We're getting a lot of information ... through
our firewalls and wireless detectors and written material from any number of
sources including US-CERT and iDefense, and so the challenge is how to meld that
together in way that our analysts can use."
The FAA, he said, has about 50,000 employees spread all over the country.
The agency has an equally massive mandate covering everything from air traffic
control to monitoring airline maintenance inspections.
"It's a challenge to maintain cyber-security through all those
different types of uses that we have for our information technology,"
Takemoto said.
"Cyber-attacks have become a global pandemic and no system is
immune," Todd Ramsey, general manager of IBM's
federal project, said in a statement. "Through this collaboration with the
FAA, as well as others under way in government and the private sector, we hope
to develop comprehensive solutions for protecting the digital and physical
infrastructures of critical national networks and enterprise systems."
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