Lockheed Martin recently opened its UK Security Intelligence Centre (SIC) in an effort to provide additional protection against cyber attacks.

Officially opened by Gerald Howarth, Minister for International Security Strategy, at the company’s facilities in Farnborough, UK, the centre is intended to enhance the company’s cyber threat detection abilities in order to provide ‘intelligence driven defence’.

The news follows a well-publicised cyber attack against the company in May this year and which Chandra McMahon, Chief of the Information Security Centre for Lockheed Martin, cited as an example of the firm’s position as a target for ‘hacktivists’.

In development since 2008, the £2.5 million self-funded centre adds to two other facilities in Denver and Gaithersburg in the US. This new SIC will extend the amount of analysis that can be conducted, with a further 20 employees at the centre, five of which are trained analysts.

Lockheed Martin believes it has a niche as far as cyber detection is concerned in that it analyses previous attacks when a new one comes through to identify whether there is ‘campaign’ being executed by an attacker. Other companies which have opened up similar specialist cyber centres include Northrop Grumman.

‘Other companies see cyber defence as a mindless process’, said Giri Sivanesan, head of cyber for Lockheed Martin’s UK IS & GS Security division. ‘We wanted to concentrate on cyber attacks on the macro level. When an attack comes in, this yields intelligence,’ Sivanesan explained. McMahon said that 80 per cent of attacks on the company could be dealt with by COTS technology.

However, the remaining 20 per cent of ‘high-level’ attacks need to be analysed and fed into a chain of other attacks so as to protect the company and its suppliers from future attacks. She also described how the company receives some 30 million e-mails per day, with only a small amount of these actually delivered once they have been filtered.

“The past two years have been very aggressive” in terms of attacks, McMahon explained. “Our network is larger than many of the governmental networks. We’re highly targeted, as you can imagine, being in the defence business,” she added.

Sivanesan said that in the future the company could utilise this experience in protecting itself so as to provide it as a product that can be sold to customers to protect their systems.