Intellectual Property Law

Wanted: Cyber Warriors and Media Sanitizers

By Kim Zetter

Defense and intelligence contractor Raytheon is moving into the lucrative realm of cyber warfare, and wants to hire hundreds of “cyber warriors” to “play offense and defense,” according to an advertisement on the company’s web site.

“President Obama recently announced that cyber security is one of our country?s most urgent national security priorities,” reads the ad. “Raytheon is answering that call by hiring more cyber warriors this year to help fight the digital cyber war.”

The ad says the company has 250 positions available in its Intelligence and Information Systems (IIS) division. The jobs are for, among others, reverse engineers, kernel developers, and vulnerability and intrusion detection engineers. Raytheon also has positions available for something called “media sanitation specialists.”

The latter probably refers to workers skilled at erasing data from hard drives and other storage, rather than to workers capable of spinning the company’s message to journalists.  But Raytheon did not respond to a call seeking clarification.

Several defense contractors, including Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) have recently been buying up smaller computer security firms in an effort to obtain billions of federal dollars coming into play as the government begins to ramp up its efforts to protect government, military and private critical infrastructure networks from attack.

Last month, the Defense Department announced the creation of a unified cyber command center to be located at the National Security Agency’s Maryland headquarters and headed by NSA Lt. General Keith Alexander. The command center will be responsible for protecting military networks and for developing cyber warfare weapons and strategies.

Raytheon purchased three computer network security firms (Oakley Networks, SI Government Solutions and Telemus Solutions Inc) in the last two years to build up its cyber security capabilities, and announced plans last December to add 300 more security engineers to its stable in 2009.

All of the positions mentioned in the company’s ad are in Linthicum and Fort Meade, Maryland, home of the NSA; Melbourne, Florida; Northern Virginia (various locations); and Garland, Texas, headquarters for Raytheon’s IIS division. The latter was also, for a brief time in 2000, the base of operations for a data mining project Raytheon conducted for the Defense Department’s Able Danger program, a counter-terrorism program set up prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that was later faulted for failing to connect 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta to Al Qaeda.

Photo courtesy of U.S. Air Force

See also:

• Defense Contractors See $$$ in Cyber Security

Full post as published by Threat Level on July 22, 2009 (boomark / email).