Teams of Navy cyber warriors have joined the front lines at sea by deploying on both Carrier Strike Groups and Amphibious Ready Groups in an effort to keep pace with newly emerging enemy attacks and attempted intrusions.
As many as 17 Defense Cyber Operations teams are now deployed around the globe, Vice Adm. Michael Gilday, Commander, US Cyber Fleet Command, told Congress.
This revved up cyber warrior presence at sea indicates the widespread implicit concern that weapons and data networks across the service are becoming more vulnerable to enemy attacks. As a result, given the rapidly increasing degree to which ship based weapons, networks, fire control systems and other shipboard technologies are becoming more and more cyber reliant, the service is now making an extra high-tech push to improve offensive and defensive cyber tactics.
In particular, Gilday stressed that AI, machine learning and increased automation were indispensable to this effort.
“We need these tools to help sense what is normal and detect activity on the network that is outside that. This is so we can act quickly using advanced analytics enabled by AI and machine learning which will give us a tactical advantage in identifying malicious activity early,” Gilday told the Senate Armed Services Committee, Cybersecurity Subcommittee.
“We need to respond faster than the adversary – and envision automation as the means to outpace that threat. This includes increasing the diversity of our sensors on our networks and moving beyond strictly signature based capabilities to behavioral sensing,” Gilday told Congress in written testimony.
AI is fast becoming a widely deployed technology to leverage algorithms able to quickly process vast amounts of information while instantly drawing upon and organizing seemingly limitless amounts of historical data. This enabled cyber defenders to much more readily detect anomalies and cyber signatures likely to indicate a potential intruder.