US rallies hackers to defend networks

The exotic nature of the work, coupled with the deep recession, is enabling the companies to attract top young talent that once would have gone to Silicon Valley. Nearly all of the largest military firms - including Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon - have major computer-related contracts with the military and intelligence agencies.

The companies have been moving quickly to lock up the relatively small number of specialists with the training and creativity to block the attacks and design countermeasures. They have been buying smaller firms, financing academic research, and running advertisements for "cyberninjas" as other industries are shedding workers.

The changes are manifesting themselves in highly classified laboratories, where computer geeks in their 20s like to joke that they are hackers with security clearances.

At a Raytheon facility here south of the Kennedy Space Center, a hub of innovation in an earlier era, rock music blares and empty cans of Mountain Dew pile up as engineers develop tools to protect the Pentagon's computers and crack into the networks of countries that could become adversaries. Prizes like cappuccino machines and stacks of cash spur them on, and a gong sounds for each major breakthrough.

The young engineers represent the new face of a war that President Obama described Friday as "one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation."

Computer specialists say the government is behind the curve in sealing off its networks from threats that are growing more persistent and sophisticated, with thousands of intrusions each day by organized criminals and legions of hackers for nations including Russia and China.

The military contractors are now in the enviable position of turning what they learned out of necessity - protecting the sensitive Pentagon data that sit on their own computers - into a lucrative business that could replace some of the revenue lost by cancellation of conventional weapons systems.

Executives at Lockheed Martin, which has long been the government's largest information-technology contractor, also see the demand for greater computer security spreading to energy and healthcare agencies and the rest of the nation's critical infrastructure.

But for now, most companies remain focused on national security, especially in anticipating how an enemy might attack and developing the resources to strike back.

Though even the existence of research on cyberweapons was once highly classified, the Air Force plans this year to award the first publicly announced contract for developing tools to break into enemy computers. The companies are also teaming up to build a model of the Internet for testing advanced techniques.