31 May 2013 – As we have been parsing through all the material we gleaned and the interviews we conducted at last week’s  Georgetown Law Cybersecurity Institute and begin writing our post about the event,  we have also been reading a host of information on the topic and came across a Wired magazine piece about those fun guys over at DARPA.

One of the many cyberwarfare projects coming out of the US government carries the intriguing title “Plan X.” DARPA has already spent over $5 million on preliminary studies involving some of the country’s best-known game developers and special effects houses, and now the first phase of development is scheduled for this summer. The ultimate goal of this particular project: to make taking down an enemy’s cyberinfrastructure as simple as entering a few swipes on a smartphone.

In general, cyberattacks that cause serious damage often take a long time to plan and are executed by small groups of highly-specialized hackers. Also, such offensives can be unpredictable regardless of the amount of preparation involved. For better or worse, DARPA wants to … Read more