Northrop Grumman to Develop Cyber Visualisation Tools as Part of UK Research Program

Northrop Grumman Corporation has been retained by the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl) to carry out a further phase of development of the N.Guru Cyber Situational Awareness System, the software application for the visualisation of cyber events for decision makers.

The research project awarded by Dstl will be carried out by Northrop Grumman in partnership with the Universities of Oxford and South Wales. This work is part of the MOD’s Cyber Research Programme and is developing concepts, tools and techniques to provide cyber situational awareness for users.

“The ability to visualise cyber events in new ways will help create greater situational awareness and enable users to improve the speed and effectiveness of network defence decision making,” said Danny Milligan, sector managing director, Northrop Grumman Information Systems Europe. “This research and the resulting capability it produces will be a key enabler in helping the MOD to defend its digital assets intelligently and maintain its core business processes.”

The N.Guru project will develop techniques for the monitoring and mitigation of detected risks through the use of visualisations that enhance situational awareness and facilitate decision support for cyber defence. It will also explore the impact that a cyber-threat could have on business processes, look for more widespread anomalies and known threat patterns, and provide information that enables operators to develop mitigation actions.

Northrop Grumman in the U.K. has successfully supported a number of cyber research programmes following the commissioning of the Federated Cyber Range at its Fareham site in 2010. The company is also teamed with Finmeccanica for the NATO Computer Incident Response Capability, which is currently being rolled out to multiple NATO sites in Europe and North America.

Northrop Grumman is an industry leader in all aspects of computer network operations and cyber security and is at the forefront of the challenge to find innovative solutions that can effectively defend networks and offer protection across the entire cyber domain.