The Pentagon this summer will launch a new effort to solicit cyber weapons from the private sector, The Washington Post reported Wednesday afternoon. Dubbed “Plan X,” the research program has a five-year time horizon, will cost $110 million and is the work of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the same secretive agency that birthed the prototype of the Internet (ARPANET) back in 1969.
As the Post reports, “Plan X” seeks to obtain proposals for projects from U.S. companies this summer. DARPA is seeking everything from a map of the entirety of “cyberspace,” to an operating system capable of launching and surviving cyber attacks, and other systems to launch “speed-of-light attacks.” The timing of the report is interesting, coming as it does on the heels of the discovery of a new international cyber espionage tool called Flame.
