Jeff Kleck, director of the cyber portfolio at the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), said DIU is working with the U.S. Air Force under an other transaction agreement (OTA) to develop software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help speed up cyber threat detection, Federal News Network reported Friday.
“The Air Force came to us seeking an innovative commercial solution that could harness the power of AI and machine learning to drastically reduce the time it takes for their cyber operators to address malicious activity in the DoD network. Their ask was to give them a capability that could act as a virtual tier one operator. That means the analytical, the triage, the investigative work that make up the bulk of the analysts’ work in looking at these threats. They needed a system to address that,” Kleck said.
DIU is testing out three commercial cyber tools that provide the AI and automation under the OTA through the summer of 2021.
“To be able to sift through that quickly so threats can be racked, stacked and divided up based on priority is what the system is designed to do,” he added.
Kleck said the service has developed the test environment and will work with DIU and vendors in the next six months to evaluate the cyber platform against real-time data.
