Jane Edwards
A Vencore subsidiary has received two contracts worth approximately $17 million combined to perform work on two technical areas under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Rapid Attack Detection, Isolation and Characterization Systems program.
DARPA’s RADICS initiative seeks to build systems designed to restore power within one week after a cyber attack on the electrical infrastructure through research in five technical areas, Vencore said Tuesday.
These technical areas include situational awareness, network analysis, threat analysis, testbed and sandbox provider, and system evaluator.
Vencore Labs will perform research and development work on the Machine-Intelligence for Advance Notification of Threats and Energy-Grid Survivable Situational Awareness or MANTESSA system under the program’s first technical area.
The company will also develop and demonstrate the Scalable and Holistic Energy CybeR-weapon Localization and Characterization platform under the third technical area – threat analysis.
MANTESSA works to perform anomaly detection algorithms to detect cyber attacks on the power grid, while SHERLOC is designed to track and localize malware and other cyber threats to industrial control systems.
Vencore Labs started work on the two technical areas in August and will serve as a subcontractor under the RADICS program’s second technical area.
DARPA awarded the contracts nine months after it issued a broad agency announcement for the four-year, $77 million program.
