Israel-based Morphisec has received $200,000 from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) to develop technology solutions to prevent financial institution cyberattacks.
Morphisec will work to extend, deploy, test, and evaluate a Moving Target Defense (MTD)-based cybersecurity solution for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments, with the overarching goal of preventing cyberattacks without reducing the VDI’s overall performance.
“The use of VDI has grown in recent years, most commonly as an efficient structure for servers, both physical and cloud-based,” Greg Wigton, S&T project manager, said. “If attacked while unprotected, vulnerabilities in a VDI environment may impact every connected device and each machine can be a potential target for entry to the VDI.”
The award serves as part of S&T’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program (SVIP), under the Financial Services Cyber Security Active Defense Technologies solicitation, which seeks technology to protect financial institutions from attacks.
An MTD-based solution randomly changes various areas of a VDI environment’s memory such as the location of libraries, functions, variables and other types of data, officials said, adding MTD-based solutions increase the uncertainty and complexity of attacking the system, reducing the window of opportunity and increasing the cost of attack efforts.
Companies participating in the SVIP are eligible for up to $800,000 over four phases in non-dilutive funding to develop and adapt commercial technologies for homeland security use cases.