According to The Verge, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is considering implementation of a plan on developing a new strategy for cyber warfare introduced last year.
“Say you’re playing World of Warcraft, and you've got this type of sword, +5 or whatever,” cybersecurity researcher Dan Roelker tells Wired. “You don’t necessarily know what spells were used to create that sword, right? You just know it has these attributes and it helps you in this way. It’s the same type of concept. You don't need the technical details.”
Plan X is set to enter the first full phase in a four-year program that will cost $110 million. A demo of the interface, however, has been developed with help from the luminary Frog Design and illustration company Massive Black, which has worked on BioShock, Transformers, and more.
Roelker pointed out that now Plan X can be run on a 40-inch touchscreen computer Touch Table. Networks exist in a form of nodes and constellations, and threats of botnets are in the form of red nodes. The user can easily choose the weapon of the attack. They are displayed in the form of stylized icons. The selected module is sent to attack the menacing host. In the future, programs will be able to combat the icons to display rootkit upload on the targeted machine, the performance of DDoS-attack, etc.
Founder is planning official launch of Plan X to take place in late 2013, and platform release means hackers employed by the U.S. Department of Defense being provided with the product.
Analysts say that government agencies invested more than $5 million in the project, while another $110 million are yet to be spent during the next four years.
