A big reason hackers get away with stealing U.S. military secrets and millions of dollars from citizens is the anonymity afforded them by the internet. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) is working to strip away that anonymity by developing what it calls a "god-mode attribution platform."

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DARPA refers to its counterattack as "Enhanced Attribution." It intends to identify individual hackers (this process known as "actor attribution" in geekspeak) wherever they are, thereby also helping predict future cyber crimes. As it stands today, the chance of prosecuting phishers, scam artists, DDoS attackers, state sponsored hackers and other cyber criminals is remote.

DARPA's Enhanced Attribution program will bring more transparency to the obscure world of actor attribution. The program will expose the activities of hackers and other cyber criminals without revealing sources and methods.

More specifically, Enhanced Attribution will develop techniques and tools "to produce operationally and tactically relevant information" about multiple concurrent independent malicious cyber campaigns that each have multiple actors, said DARPA.

DARPA wants ideas from the public about how to identify actors using physical and behavioral biometrics; by drawing on open source data and building webs of information to reveal past and present malicious activity.

"Malicious actors in cyberspace currently operate with little fear of being caught due to the fact that it is extremely difficult, in some cases perhaps even impossible, to reliably and confidently attribute actions in cyberspace to individual," said Angelos Keromytis, DARPA project lead for the program.

"The reason cyber attribution is difficult stems at least in part from a lack of end-to-end accountability in the current internet infrastructure.

Keromytis says actors (or hackers) can foil many attribution efforts by changing their tactics, techniques, and procedures. This fact also inhibits the defender's response options.

DARPA said proposals for its Enhanced Attribution program should investigate innovative approaches that enable revolutionary advances in science, devices, or systems.

TagsDefense Advanced Research Project Agency, DARPA, Enhanced Attribution, god-mode attribution platform