WVU BENJAMIN M. STATLER COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING AND MINERAL RESOURCES
Pointing to such areas as climate change, medical technology, and world security as opportunities, Bush focused most of his talk on the defense and security industries, which make up the bulk of the work done at Northrop Grumman. “Part of the fun of the defense industry is really being at the very leading edge of technology because ultimately, that’s what creates, strategically, a military advantage for
civil air space. “We routinely launch unmanned systems into hurricanes, because those are the systems you want to send in the middle of the hurricane with the sensors to figure out what’s going on,” he said. “We want to monitor what’s going on with crops and understand how we need to better manage the production of food here in the United States. These can be great assets for that application.” Cyber-security, especially as it relates to world security, “is a heck of big deal,” Bush said. Within the United States, it is estimated that the number of cyber-attacks just on the Department of Defense and the government networks is about “400 million annually.”
Bush
How common is the threat? Bush noted that a team of engineers at Northrop Grumman did an experiment three years ago. After purchasing a computer at a local big-box store and loading it with the best in commercially available protection software, they hooked it to the Internet. All purchases and connections were paid for in cash, in an effort to disguise all ties back to the company. “Within four hours, the first hacking attempt happened on this little computer,” said Bush. “Within a day, the entire hard drive had been completely read out; remember this is with all this protection software on there. Within a
Bush foresees growth in the area of unmanned systems, including applications outside the defense realm, noting that Congress recently passed a set of regulations that instructed the FAA to start developing protocols, procedures, and regulations to use these systems within
Bush also pointed to growth opportunities in the area of the civilian space program. Northrop Grumman is building the James Webb space telescope, which will be launched in 2018 as a replacement for the Hubble telescope. This “time machine” as Bush described it, will be able to see even further back in time, and it will fly in an orbital node about a million miles away from Earth.
Using cyber-attacks as an example, Bush noted that Northrop Grumman employs cyber-security specialists, network specialists, economists, and attorneys. “So the teams that we develop that have been the most effective in the cybersecurity arena are truly multidisciplinary teams and require our engineering teams to be very comfortable working in that environment; reaching out, hearing ideas, and figuring out how to take that broad collective set of information and turning it into solutions.” At the end of the day, however, a key component to addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges, Bush said, are morals and ethics and the way an engineer approaches what he or she is doing. “The products that we build defend our nation and our allies and the ways we get that done … have a lot to do with the safety of the men and women who use our products and ultimately the safety of the populations of our country and our allies,” Bush said. “We have to take that very seriously. If you’re misleading in the way that you describe the technological capabilities that you’re going to be able to deliver, there are a lot of ways to violate that trust. It only takes one of those examples to ruin the reputation of a company, to ruin the reputation of a team, and to really impact the integrity of the science and the engineering process that goes into bringing these remarkable capabilities into reality.”
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our country and our allies,” said Bush. “So, for those of you that love the leading edge of technology, this is an industry that has a great deal of opportunity.”
week, someone had installed a root kit, which essentially allows a hacker to control the computer remotely. Within two weeks, this poor little computer had been taken over by a server in Canada, which we were able to trace to a server in Singapore, which it turned out was being run by a server someplace else, which we couldn’t figure out. So this little computer all by itself had been enslaved in two weeks.”
Bush noted several things that the engineers of the future will need to be successful in these burgeoning fields. “Every one of these challenges requires that engineers be able to work in a truly multidisciplinary way; to be very comfortable working with people from other fields who have ideas, who have insights, and perspectives that can help the engineering teams and can help the collective teams solve problems,” he said, adding that engineers also need to be comfortable working as part of a big team in a global environment.
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