US Navy Will Use Data Analytics For Maritime Security

Uploaded on 2024-02-28 in FREE TO VIEW

The US Navy has been drowning in data it cannot organise and make sense of. Now, it is beginning to use automation and data analytics to improve cyber defenses for its unclassified networks and work on improving Naval cyber operators’ work.

Data collected will be used to create structured data sets to support the organisation’s move towards more predictive maintenance planning in the future.

“Instead of an operator having to read through millions and millions of pieces of data to try to identify commonalities and what's going on on one part of the network, and what's going on across another part of the network that might be significantly spread across the world, the analytic is able to point to us and say, ‘This is where you should be concerned,’” said Vice Adm. Craig Clapperton, the head of US Fleet Cyber Command and 10th Fleet said during WEST 2024, an annual Navy IT conference.

These tools, which use a combination of data analysis and automation, can search out suspicious activity and group incidents together. But the helpfulness stops at attribution, which is where the human operators come in.

“Sometimes the machines aren't as great at dissecting and getting down to the attribution of it and how you should solve the problem,” he said. “So this is where the AI and machine learning and the human [operator] have to come together to maximise the benefit from that.”

Over the past year, US Fleet Cyber Command has expanded its use of these tools that detect when devices are logged onto the network and those needed for identity verification to all of the Navy’s unclassified networks Clapperton said.

“That includes our overseas platforms, [education] platforms. And…we're in the process of, no kidding, eliminating what we call accepted networks, which have been networks that have been able to operate outside our visibility of those endpoints and that identity, which then poses the greatest risk to adversarial access,” he said.

The US Navy also wants to use the same data analytics capabilities that can help decipher malicious network activity on land to secure platforms at sea.

Image: Pixabay

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