http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/05/cyberwar-cassandras-get-400-million-in-conflict-cash/ By Noah Shachtman Danger Room Wired.com May 17, 2010 Coincidences sure are funny things. Booz Allen Hamilton -- the defense contractor that's become synonymous with the idea that the U.S. is getting its ass kicked in an ongoing cyberwar -- has racked up more than $400 million worth of deals in the past six weeks to help the Defense Department fight that digital conflict. Strange how that worked out, huh? Everyone in the Pentagon from Defense Secretary Bob Gates on down says that the military needs to cut its reliance on outside contractors. But few firms are as well-connected as Booz Allen, the one-time management consultancy that today pulls in more than $2.7 billion in government work. And few firms sound the alarm as loudly about a crisis that they're in the business of fixing. Back in February, for instance, former National Security Agency director and Booz Allen Hamilton executive vice president Mike McConnell declared that "the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing." The White House's information security czar is one of many experts who calls such rhetoric overheated, at best. That hasn't stopped Booz Allen from pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars from Washington to wage those battles. Booz Allen's latest awards were announced last Thursday -- nine contracts with the Air Force, totaling over $150 million. One deal gives the firm $24 million to "provide combat-ready forces to conduct secure cyber operations in and through the electromagnetic spectrum." A $19.8 million contract asks Booz Allen to "define information assurance scientific and technical analysis to be applied to future military satellite communication systems development." Earlier in the month, the company got $14 million to "provide threat monitoring, detection, characterization, and actionable information for the computer network operations in order to help advance Department of Defense Global Information Grid initiative and nationally oriented cyber security priorities." That sounds not dissimilar to what McConnell asked for in February. "We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options -- and we must be able to do this in milliseconds," he wrote. [...] _______________________________________________ Best Selling Security Books and More! Shop InfoSec News http://www.shopinfosecnews.org/Received on Mon May 17 2010 - 22:37:28 PDT
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