Empowering Cyber Warriors at the Edge

Booz Allen commits to helping the United States achieve cyber dominance throughout the spectrum of military operations, from competition to conflict. When a U.S. defense organization needed to execute forward-deployed missions of unprecedented complexity, we supported its cyber operators and analysts with our Cyber Precog Flyaway Kit, a hardware-software edge solution that provides advanced compute, cyber tooling, and data analysis capabilities. In demanding maritime environments, our solution enables forward-deployed operators to harness enterprise-level analytics insights and integrated cyber effects at the edge to establish competitive advantage for a key security mission: thwarting the growing array of sophisticated attack vectors across the digital battlespace.

The United States now faces cyber adversaries that leverage whole-of-nation capabilities to deploy advanced exploits and effects. These well-organized, highly motivated threat actors seek to identify vulnerabilities in the defensive cyber infrastructure the federal government uses to safeguard military forces.

As the SolarWinds cyberattack shows, a whole-of-nation approach that leverages large-scale technical and human resources has already enabled adversaries to develop technologies and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) that create positions of advantage. Reflecting today’s challenging threat landscape, approximately 9 in 10 IT security leaders believe a nation-state has targeted their organization with a cyberattack.

Adversaries are becoming especially adept at damaging the connective tissue of U.S. defense missions with anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) attacks. To respond, the client organization sought to access new resources for conducting ship-to-shore cyber operations across contested maritime spaces. The goal was to enable mission success even when adversaries use A2/AD attacks to prevent operators in the field from reaching back to remote resources for data processing and support. Transforming the resilience and effectiveness of the client’s operations meant harnessing innovative cyber tools and paradigms in hardware, software, training, and more.

The client’s cyber operators execute their missions in the high-risk environments that adversarial nations increasingly seek to dominate, including maritime environments with congested vessel traffic and challenging weather conditions. But conducting operations and pre-operational assessments in the ship-to-shore space requires the ability to run large computational workloads that underpin artificial intelligence (AI) models, encryption protocols, and other applications.

To help the client better navigate today’s digital battlespace, our team leveraged a Booz Allen-designed flyaway kit to build a new approach for ensuring robust compute capacity at the edge. We designed our approach to drive deployment of offensive cyber solutions that fully integrate a host of non-kinetic effects across an expanse of operational environments.

Packaging this capability in a mobile, expeditionary form factor would make it ideal for achieving and orchestrating cyber effects on site and at mission speed. Rather than rely on processing support sourced from a home base, the client’s cyber operators would take the required compute power with them wherever the mission led, in a form factor compact enough for use even on a space-constrained ship.

The Booz Allen approach would ultimately help the client deploy a mobile, hardened solution that fully delivers cyber intelligence and effects at the edge, with frictionless data ingestion and analysis for rapid, highly accurate decision making during critical operations.

Today’s cyber operations demand operators ready to respond and adapt to fast-changing mission needs and evolving operational environments. Operators and organizations can no longer be content with fleeting cyber advantage. Sustained superiority requires cyber dynamism, which is the ability to rapidly evolve, adapt, and scale operational capability and mission efficacy to the constant evolution of cyber warfare. Cyber dynamism requires looking beyond the temporary wins of an accelerating arms race of offensive effects versus defensive remediation toward a strategy that shortens and streamlines the cyber kill chain.