IBM said that it is working with US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on a research and development project to protect the nation’s civilian aviation system from the threat of cyber attacks.
Under the agreement, IBM researchers and cyber security experts will design and build a prototype security system capable of scaling to accommodate the FAA’s high-speed networks. Streaming analytics will be a key design component of the FAA prototype system.
According to IBM, the project will introduce new security analytics technologies and approaches to protect large digital and physical infrastructures from hacking, botnets, malware and other forms of cyber attacks. The new system will be able to correlate historical traffic patterns with dynamic data from monitors, sensors and other devices capturing information about network traffic and user activity in real time.
IBM said that the new technology will enable FAA to analyse the data flowing through its networks in real time and get insights about possible threats and system compromises. The FAA will also be able to store real-time results in a data warehouse for later analysis and supervised learning.
Customised executive-level dashboards will be put in place to deliver up-to-the-second information on the security posture of the FAA networks. The 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, IBM said.
Todd Ramsey, general manager of the US Federal at IBM, said: Cyber attacks have become a global pandemic and no system is immune. Through this collaboration with the FAA, as well as others underway 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.
