Photo: Dan M

SAIC Inc. and energy software firm C3 have formed an alliance to deliver energy solutions to public sector, industrial and commercial customers, according to an SAIC release.

SAIC said the companies initially formed a partnership in 2011. The new agreement includes joint product development, sales, marketing, and support.

SAIC will sell, install and support C3’s software as part of its energy services offerings. The companies will offer services and software for:

• market analysis, financial management and procurement strategies
• building and designing emissions-related projects
• aggregating and managing of energy related data

“C3 provides a comprehensive software solution that helps organizations to more deeply understand and better manage their energy effectiveness,” said J.T. Grumski, an SAIC senior vice president.

SAIC said its work will include engineering, procurement, and construction services.

According to the company, the project will generate 37.5 megawatts of clean energy to power about 37,000 homes. The company also said wood from construction and demolition sites, wood pallets and land clearing materials will be used to power the project.

“This project requires an integrated set of capabilities across our energy, environment and infrastructure organization and will result in an innovative biomass facility that contributes to a secure and clean energy supply in the New England region,” said J.T. Grumski, an SAIC senior vice president.

The project, owned by an Enova Energy Group subsidiary, will be located in Plainfield, Ct. The facility is expected to be completed in December 2013.

dhs.gov

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, for example, plans to increase cybersecurity research spending by 50 percent over the next five years, according to an ExecutiveGov report 

As the government is making moves to spend more in cybersecurity, contractors too are gearing up for projects in the cyber field. A recent report by the Washington Post indicated that many firms are now turning to cybersecurity.

SAIC Inc. recently opened an innovation center in Fort Meade last year, near the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command.

Booz Allen Hamilton for its part opted to build a cyber network that can work with multiple clients nationwide from their McLean-based facility. 

Booz Allen Chief Operating Officer Horacio Rozanski noted his firm is serving clients on the West Coast out of Red Bank, N.J. and Federal Aviation Administration clients out of Huntsville, Ala.

“Having that capability, we believe, is going to be market-driving,” he said.

Dave Melcher

Contractors are also looking to drive up revenue by what SAIC officials call “readiness and sustainment” of old equipment, trucks and aircraft. SAIC recently won two task orders worth $600 million to sustain blast proof trucks in Kuwait and Afghanistan.

ITT Exelis President and CEO David Melcher told the Post that sustainment work is the way to go.

“If you’re going to cut out the new systems, what are you going to do? You’re going to fix up the old systems,” he said. Contractors are also doing the work for contract wins themselves, rather than subcontracting the work.

In “Behavioral Risk Indicators of Malicious Insider Theft of Intellectual Property: Misreading the Writing on the Wall” authors Dr. Eric Shaw and Dr. Harley Stock paint a picture of what these malicious insiders look like, with the majority being employees in technical positions. 

This insider thief averages out to be a 37-year-old male, who already has a new job. In fact, some 67 percent of insider thieves already have a new job lined up and more than half steal data within a month of leaving, according the report summary. 

Symantec describes these offenders as people with personal “predispositions and stressors,” making them susceptible to stealing intellectual property.

The researchers point to professional setbacks as one thing that pushes insiders to take information they already have access to. Fifty-two percent of cases had a trade secret stolen and in a majority of the time, all the insider used was a network email to do the job.

The cyber thief profile goes along with a program that SAIC Inc. and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are working on to detect suspicious online behavior before an insider could successfully wreak havoc.

The Anomaly Detection at Multiple Scales program seeks to create, adapt and apply software that can track a person’s online activity at work. E-mails, instant messaging and browsing history are all fair game under the ADAMS program.

Researchers from Oregon State University, the University of Massachusetts, and Carnegie Mellon University are also participating in the program.

ADAMS seeks to figure out how trusted individuals become motivated to attack, as well as to detect and highlight suspicious behavior before an attack occurs.

“Our system tries to find these individuals who have gone down that slippery slope, but before they’ve done any crime or anything illegal,” said the project’s co-principal investigator David Bader, according to Defense Systems. Bader is a professor at the Georgia Tech School of Computational Science and Engineering and the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

The ADAMS program was launched in the summer and a framework was demonstrated in October, according to Bader.

Paul Smith of Red Hat

 Red Hat and SAIC have agreed to collaborate to create solutions that will try to maximize open source cloud computing technologies that are scalable, secure, interoperable and portable.

The companies’ goal is to reduce infrastructure costs and ease the Defense Department‘s adoption of cloud computing.

Through the collaboration, Red Hat solutions will help progress at SAIC’s Advanced Computer Engineering Laboratory located in North Charleston, S.C. 

Those solutions include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Middlewar, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, systems management technologies, Red Hat CloudForms and OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service cloud computing platform.

Specifically, collaborators will learn how Red Hat’s modular and open technology portfolio can be integrated into their cloud architecture. 

This collaboration comes soon after SAIC’s recently announced cybersecurity partnership with McAfee.

“Red Hat has a longstanding relationship with SAIC to provide open source technologies and methodologies on large programs in the federal government, dating back to our first master marketing agreement in 2006,” said Paul Smith, Red Hat’s public sector vice president and general manager.

“This most recent iteration capitalizes the widespread use by cloud providers of open source architectures to deliver services. Red Hat is a leading provider of supported, secure and scalable products for both IaaS and PaaS.”

Up to a hundred Veteran-owned small business leaders with a focus on cyber and IT had the chance to hear about opportunities in the cyber environment from Maryland’s Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown and Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Edward Chow.

Maryland has all the ingredients a state needs to become a force in federal contracting: regional concentration of government agencies, defense facilities, high-tech industry and leading academic institutions. State leaders are pushing hard for Maryland to become a leader in the newly booming cybersecurity industry.

Keynote speaker Dennis Bartko, Special Assistant to the Director for Cyber at the National Security Agency, described key challenges in cybersecurity today and NSA’s intelligence role. He said NSA recognizes no trade-off between individual liberties and national security. “We protect both,” he said, “and we must, because our mission is firmly based on the Constitution.”

Executives from ARGO-Systems, TeleCommunication Systems, and SAIC headed the industry discussion. Frederick J. Ferrer, ARINC’s Director for Cyberspace, headed the event, introducing panel discussions and was happy with the way the event turned out.

“The goal of today’s conference has been to empower, engage, and educate Maryland’s Veteran-owned Small Businesses, so they can take advantage of the cyber opportunities in today’s market,”  said Ferrer. “I believe we have accomplished some of that, and now I’m looking forward to hearing some of your success stories in the future.”

McAfee FOCUS 11

All the buzz is about McAfee and its FOCUS 11, which kicked off earlier this week in Las Vegas. The company reported a record attendance of security professionals came together to discuss what’s to come next in the security realm. With multiple announcements regarding new products, partnerships and solutions, its no wonder why McAfee’s name has made headlines all week long.

In the first round of conference announcements, McAfee expressed that McAfee Deep Defender is the industry’s next generation of endpoint security, capable of detecting almost all kernel-mode malware made possible with McAfee DeepSAFE technology. The company said Deep Defender enables real-time memory and CPU monitoring, true zero-day detection, protection against known and unknown threats and central management with McAfee’s ePolicy Orchestrator platform. 

McAfee worked closely with parent company Intel to deliver this hardware-assisted security solution that can stop and remediate advanced stealth behaviors used by rootkits and APTs. No doubt, the two will continue to work together to more effectively prevent attacks.

McAfee has extended the endpoint security management offering to include McAfee ePo Deep Command, which provides beyond-the-operating system management. The company said it allows security administrators to reduce operation costs and gives users full control to out-of-reach PCs and the ability to execute security tasks. Take an enterprise with 20,000 nodes and put ePo to work and it could save an estimated annual cost of $600,000, the company said.

McAfee also spent time discussing its initiatives to drive partner profitability. Some 700 worldwide partners attending the two day partner summit learned how the company plans to evolve its partner investment strategy and address three key areas to build mutually beneficial growth.

To grow together, McAfee SecurityAlliance, allows companies to identify new markets and opportunies for partner growth. McAfee will also expand beyond the reseller ecosystem to include a new McAfee managed service partner program. Within the initiatives, McAfee wants to help optimize its partners operations so they can work better together. Above all, McAfee plans to invest in its partners and offer them programs, tool, training and resources that drive mutual profitability with programs such as McAfee accredited channel engineer program. 

And while McAfee had a lot to say, so did the attendees. FOCUS 11 featured panel breakout discussions covering topics such as endpoint protection, security foundations and “network heroes”.  HP’s Andrzej Kawalec gave a keynote address entitled “Risk: Threat or Opportunity” and Peder Jungck, VP and CTO of CloudShield Technologies, an SAIC company, spoke on ”implementing ‘true’ secure clouds.”

The announcements at FOCUS 11 were not the only ones we heard from McAfee this week, including a new enterprise cybersecurity partnership with SAIC and the addition of new innovation alliance partners. Surely they will not be the last it will pull from its sleeve in the next few weeks.

The beginning of the agreement calls for McAfee Network Threat Response to be integrated into CloudShield’s PN41 for the IBM Blade Center and CS4000 platforms. McAfee Network Threat Response captures, deconstructs, and analyzes malware in real time. 

SAIC’s Chief Information Office and director for cybersecurity solutions, Charles Beard, indicated that cyber threats outpace hardware based defense models especially in a time when critical data must move beyond the company network to the mobile endpoint.

“Our combined approach augments these historical investments with active threat intelligence and out-of-band, reprogrammable hardware platforms that intelligently adapt to anticipate, detect and remediate cyber-threats in sophisticated network infrastructures,” said Beard. 

“McAfee Network Threat Response technology combined with SAIC’s solutions based deployment approach offers IT professionals advanced security at every level across the network,”said Joe Sexton, executive vice president of global sales at McAfee. 

According to Beard, the combined offerings meet CIO and CISO for “a more aggressive model that allows CIOs and CISOs to consume virtualized services and applications based on their unique threat vectors and desired security posture is an alternative approach that is long overdue.”

McAfee security products in combination with SAIC’s CloudShield security products will present companies with access to new markets and create a stronger solution. 

John Thomas, SAIC

SAIC has announced GeoRover Mobile, a program enabling the collection of geographic information system data in the field with or without network connectivity, in addition to traditional capabilities.

GeoRover Mobile can be used to collect and edit field data for use by environmental, utility, law enforcement, education, land management, forestry, and government and defense applications.

The program resides on mobile devices that operate on the Android platform and integrates GPS and Wi-Fi networks to provide current location data and other information.

“We are pleased to provide customers with mobile GIS solutions for the Android platform, delivering the ability to visualize map content while collecting data even in the most remote locations,” said John Thomas, SAIC senior vice president and general manager of the intelligence systems. “This new technology demonstrates SAIC’s ability to offer cutting edge mobile solutions helping solve difficult problems.”