Pikewerks Receives Contract to Secure Industrial Control Systems
03.08.2010
Pikewerks Corporation announced today that it has been awarded a contract from the Air Force to develop cyber security techniques aimed at securing Industrial Control Systems (ICS). ICS are critical electronic assets in electrical, water, oil/gas, and manufacturing services involving supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA), distributed control systems (DCS), and programmable logic controllers (PLCs). As a result of their criticality and expected 100% availability, ICS introduces numerous security challenges, which need to be overcome through research such as this. Initially, safeguarding for these systems was provided through physical security measures around the deployment environments; however, over time these systems have been networked and made accessible either directly or indirectly on the internet. The new network availability of ICS has made them vulnerable to a whole new class of threats including: viruses, worms, trojans, and system exploitations from buffer overflows, logic errors, network protocols, and denial of service (DOS) attacks. Cyber attacks on these systems can disrupt service or deceive operators and lead to incorrect and dangerous actions. Protection from electronic, over the wire attacks is critical to the ongoing operation of this national resource.
Pikewerks Receives $1M Contract Enhancement to Develop Additional Software Protections
02.25.2010
Pikewerks Corporation announced today that it has been awarded a contract from the Air Force Research Laboratory for the development of advanced capabilities for detecting, preventing and responding to a variety of hardware based and hardware assisted attacks. This research and development will further strengthen software protection capabilities such as Electronic Armor® and Binary FortressTM.
Pikewerks Establishes a Special Operations Division
02.01.2010
Pikewerks announced today that Adam Fraser has been named Director of its newly-established Special Operations Division. Mr. Fraser comes to Pikewerks from the United States Air Force (USAF) 688th Information Operations Wing. Mr. Fraser has provided leadership, technical guidance and project management to network warfare squadrons, law enforcement, counterintelligence agencies, and combatant commands during his tenure at the USAF. He most recently served as the Chief of Network Access Engineering - where he led a 60-person team in offensive and defensive computer network warfare development and analysis for the 90th Information Operations Squadron. He has also served as a Special Agent for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), as the Chief of Computer Investigations & Operations for AFOSI Det 253, and is an Adjunct Information Security and Privacy Professor at the University of Texas - San Antonio.
"Pikewerks is excited to have Adam join the company and help stand up the Special Operations Division," said Michael Ring, CEO of Pikewerks. "His leadership experience in intrusion response and engagement, malware analysis, and offensive network warfare capabilities will be an asset to the Company". Mr Fraser said, "I am honored that Pikewerks has entrusted me with establishing this new division. We have ambitious goals for the coming months, including plans to open an office in San Antonio, TX in the immediate future."
The newly-created Special Operations Division will provide technology development and field support for U.S. Cyber Command, the Air Force, and other government agencies. The Division's responsibilities cover three broad areas: capability development, training, and mission support. The establishment of this Division will enable Pikewerks to better support its customers' missions while continuing to be a leading provider of technical Cybersecurity and Information Operations capabilities.
Visit Pikewerks During the 2010 DOD Cyber Crime Conference
01.25.2010
Visit Pikewerks during the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Conference at the Renaissance Grand Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri, January 25-29. Pikewerks will host a booth during the exhibition and will be providing demonstrations of its volatile memory analysis product, Second LookTM. Second Look captures, and forensically preserves, a computer's volatile random-access memory (RAM). It analyzes the Linux operating system kernel in live memory or via a memory image, verifying its integrity and searching for signs of rootkits or other subversive software that have modified the executable kernel code or kernel data structures. Please contact the development team at secondlook@pikewerks.com for further details, or to receive an evaluation copy.
Pikewerks Awarded Air Force Contract to Create a Network Transformation Capability
01.22.2010
The first step an attacker takes when targeting a network is to perform pre-attack reconnaissance and gather intelligence about the systems. This information may include reachable hosts, open ports, firewalls and/or routers present, what rules govern traffic, and what operating systems are running on the machines. As the attackers expand their model of the target network, they can better identify its weak points and vulnerabilities.
Pikewerks Corporation announced today that it has been awarded a six-month contract from the Air Force to create a network transformation capability designed to dynamically change the location of running services, and continually obscure the host operating systems on a network. This new capability will assist in computer network defense by creating an ever-changing, self-mutating network architecture, which can further be hardened by software protection mechanisms such as Electronic Armor®.