U.S. intelligence needs cyber attack prediction system

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 conceived by the Office, the system should automatically monitor Internet activity, which would indicate the planning and preparation of attacks.

Among the data sources are social networks, news, chats, blogs, message boards, search queries, and other sources (possibly large cryptocurrency transactions). Despite the obvious connection between the proposed system’s field of activity and the data that ECHELON and PRISM illegally collect, it is reported that project developers will not be given access to 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.


Minority Report IARPA

will oversee the development of the system.(Agency for Advanced Research of the Intelligence Agency) - an analogue of DARPA, not only with a military theme, but with a bias in scientific research and processing of "big data". Agency budget and projects are for the most part classified. An IARPA unit called the Surprise Prediction Service will be directly involved in the development.



The system is proposed to be called CAUSE (Cyber-attack Automated Unconventional Sensor Environment, environment for non-standard automatic cyber-attack detectors). The mission of the project, designed for 3-5 years, judging by the presentation: "Invest in high-risk and highly profitable research that could potentially give US intelligence a huge advantage over their enemies." CAUSE will need to automatically predict cases of unauthorized access to data, DOS attacks, malicious code injection, and system scans to find entry points.


Person of interest