Building Tomorrow’s Cyber Defense Today

When Will Farrell, Booz Allen Hamilton's Dark Labs director, talks about setting a mousetrap, cheese is not the bait. 

Instead, Will and his elite team use fake computers in a phony network, intentionally built to be vulnerable. The main goal of this virtual mousetrap is to lure cyber adversaries, who find it nearly impossible to resist hacking into those fake machines.

This approach to building a better defense is the creative strategy Will and his team at Booz Allen’s Dark Labs deploy to protect vulnerable systems.

Many companies look inward in designing cybersecurity programs, building bigger fences and buying more bells and whistles to secure their perimeter. But inevitably, adversaries will find a way in.

“Instead of looking from the inside out, we look from the outside in. We pretend to be the bad guys,” says Will. “You’ve got to think like the adversary to beat them.”

It’s just that kind of strategic thinking that a major oil and gas company was looking for when its chief information security officer (CISO) asked Booz Allen to reevaluate the company’s cybersecurity program.

But there was a catch. The CISO didn’t want the team to even look at the company’s current cyber state to start. Instead, he asked them one overarching question: What should the company’s cybersecurity program look like in 5 years?

“We were literally going off almost nothing. The CISO didn’t want us to be clouded by their current program,” says Booz Allen's Deputy Project Manager Gary Barnabo. “We had a totally blank slate to offer a fresh view.”

This global company is transforming from an oil company to an integrated energy company. And its value chain is vast—everything from exploratory drilling and extraction, refineries, and pipelines, to transportation fleets and gas stations.

Booz Allen Project Manager Matt Doan never underestimated the task at hand. “We knew we’d need to do some pretty creative thinking, but make sure it was grounded in defensible frameworks and logic,” says Matt.

In free-flowing sessions, the team of business and cyber strategists, threat intelligence specialists, hackers, reverse engineers, and industrial control systems experts brought bold thinking to this future challenge, conjuring up a comprehensive vision for the year 2022.

They outlined technological, geopolitical, economic, and other global forces causing business and cyber change. And they forecasted the resulting cyber challenges, such as relentless cost pressures and the overwhelming diversity of Internet of Things technologies permeating every part of the organization.

The ultimate goal? Package the ideas into a compelling blueprint of a future-state cyber program; one that would set the vision for the capabilities and operating model needed to address cyber risk 5 years down the road.