The U.S. Army is open-sourcing a code it uses to analyze cyberattacks. For the past five years, whenever a Department of Defense network has been compromised, the Army has used the Dshell framework to do forensic analysis on the attacks.


This move is meant to encourage developers to add custom modules that'll help the Army understand what happens when they get attacked. Since cyberattacks that happen to the government are often similar to the ones that happen elsewhere, letting non-government people give their input is a way to expand the Army's knowledge of the kind of attacks that go down.


"The success of Dshell so far has been dependent on a limited group of motivated individuals within government. By next year it should be representative of a much larger group with much more diverse backgrounds to analyze cyber attacks that are common to us all," Army Research Lab's Network Security branch chief William Glodek said about the decision to open-source.

You can download the Dshell framework at Github if you want to check it out. Let me know if there's anything that sticks out. [Science Blog]