Research budgetDARPA to boost cyber research spending by 50 percent

Last week, the head of the Department of Defense’s advanced research arm announcedthat the agency would increase cyber research spending by 50 percent over the next five years to develop both defensive and offensive capabilities.

In a speech, Regina Dugan, the director of the Defense Advance Projects Research Agency (DARPA), told cyber professionals that “modern warfare will demand the effective use of cyber, kinetic, and combined cyber and kinetic means.”

As a result, “We need more options, we need more speed, and we need more scale. We must both protect its peaceful shared use as well as prepare for hostile cyber acts that threaten our military capabilities,” she said.

For fiscal year 2012, DARPA requested $208 million in cyber spending in fiscal 2012, compared to $120 million the year before.

Dugan’s remarks are the first time she has openly discussed her agency’s efforts to develop offensive cyber capabilities. She did not provide any specific details, but other military commanders have offered similar insights.

Lieutenant General Rhett Hernandez, the commanding general of the U.S. Army’s Cyber Command, has called for “cyber warriors” who can “operationalize cyberspace” with a “full range of cyber capabilities,” including offensive capabilities.

On the defensive end, Dugan called securing data networks “one of the most intense challenges of our time,” and that DARPA and other agencies needed to come up with creative solutions to overcome these challenges.

Dugan also warned that existing cybersecurity efforts are leading to a large convoluted bureaucracy that is not nimble enough to stop hackers.

“We are losing ground because we are inherently divergent from the threat,” she said.

According to Dugan, viruses have remained small over the years, but the defensive security apparatus has continued to grow.

“Such divergences are the seeds of surprise, and this [size disparity] is a striking example of why it’s currently easier to play offense rather than defense in cyber. This is not to suggest that we stop doing what we are doing in cybersecurity. But if we continue only down the current path, we will not converge with the threat.”