US Department of Homeland Security Awards $1.7Mn DDoS Contract

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has approved a $1.7 million contract to Galois, a computer science specialist company. Galois is tasked with creating a “peer-to-peer collaboration mechanism through which organizations work together to detect and mitigate” distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. DDos attacks occur when hackers crash websites with massive volumes of fake traffic. If successful, the project will “reduce mitigation response time by 50%, resulting in peak traffic reduction of 75%-90%. Additionally, it plans to reduce the time between the start of the attack and the detection of the attack by 25%.” Adam Wick of Galois explains that current DDoS defense systems “operate in isolation,” which increases the time to detect, report and respond to a DDoS attack. With the number of DDoS attacks increasing in severity and magnitude, this $1.7 million contract would surely be worth the investment if successful.