According to a listing of contract award on FBO.gov, DARPA was apparently paying $500 to an unknown agency to spy on white hat hackers. DARPA made a mistake to publish details of this project. The project called “Internet Cyber Early Warning of Adversary Research and Development” or ICEWARD appears to be designed to monitor the activities of information security researchers with the goal of anticipating what vulnerabilities they might be looking for. DARPA paid nearly $500,000 to an obscure contractor to develop the technology to make it a reality. “Proposers hypothesize that vulnerability researchers make use of public information and resources (such as search engines and websites) that are relevant to their missions, targets, and techniques in such a way that it is possible to glean part of their intent if only we could observe such use and differentiate it from noise,” read the DARPA contract award.
— EFF (@EFF) October 26, 2015 Immediately after the news was made public, several privacy activists took to Twitter to trounce it as a program to spy on security researchers.
— Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) October 26, 2015
— Nate Cardozo (@ncardozo) October 26, 2015 DARPA did another mistake of pulling down the listing after it was made public by Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Dave Maass.
— Dave Maass ? (@maassive) October 26, 2015
