WASHINGTON — From the outside, the building is so nondescript that it wouldn't raise eyebrows in any business park in America. On the inside, though, Raytheon's

Cyber Operations, Development & Evaluation (CODE) Center

is full of cutting edge technology, discretely tucked away behind heavily secured doors.

The Northern Virginia facility has been operational since 2011, but the company hasn't publicly disclosed its capabilities until recently, when it extended invitations to tour the building to a small handful of journalists.

Raytheon Chairman and CEO Thomas Kennedy said the CODE Center exemplifies the company's increasing focus on growing its cyber business.

"In the last two years, we have essentially grown an international cyber business from zero to very strong," he said, adding that the company has seen its Raytheon Cyber Products business grow by 20 percent year upon year.

Raytheon would not disclose how much it has invested on its CODE Center, but it represents a significant investment made during the economic downturn, when many defense companies were scaling back on expenditures.

The building features boasts two rooms resembling classrooms, with rows of tables with computers and monitors on them, which sit across a small hall from each other. It is here that they conduct their red team/blue team drills, with one side posing as hostile (virtual) intruders. The other tries, with the other trying to fend off their cyber attacks in real time.

This fall, the facility will host a drill involving 140 government employees from more than a dozen agencies, Raytheon officials said. In one room, the employees will try to get through a normal workday while cyber enemies in the other room devise new and unexpected interruptions.

"We are actually training our engineers to be cyberwarfare experts, so that they understand what the ramifications are of the threat and help them better understand how to design their systems in a way that they can help them be resilient to the cyber threat," Kennedy said.

Down another hallway, Raytheon has constructed a room-sized Faraday cage, where it can run tests without any electronic or electromagnetic interference from outside. The room features and a steel frame lined with carbon cones like the knobby soundproofing insulation found in recording studios. Journalists, and we entered using a door resembling that resembles a bank vault.

Raytheon officials said they have used the isolation chamber to see whether they could remotely see, seize control of, and crash a small quad-propeller drone. (They could.) They then coated the drone in Raytheon's electronic armor, and found they couldn't repeat their previous success.

On another floor, Raytheon installed a security operating center, or SOC, built to replicate the company's SOC in Garland, Texas, Kennedy said.

"It essentially monitors our whole network, checking for issues," he said. "We put another SOC here on purpose, so that we can show our international customers in real time how these systems are being utilized."

For the past decade, Raytheon has been fending off cyber intrusions, and plans on marketing its expertise in the commercial marketplace, Kennedy said.

"We have a deep domain knowledge of what the vulnerabilities of a system are, whether they are connected via the Internet or some RF [radio frequency] device. And we've been using that to develop products, solution sets, to protect ourselves," he said. "This facility here actually can test not just Internet vulnerabilities, but RF vulnerabilities, via Bluetooth, via wi-fi, Link16, whatever else."

Byron Callan, an analyst with Capital Alpha Partners, said it will be challenging for traditional defense contractors to move into the commercial cybersecurity market, but Raytheon seems to understand the need to accept the cultural differences between the two spheres and to create a bridge between them. As the recent hack of Sony Pictures Entertainment demonstrated, military and commercial threats have more and more in common, he said.

"There is a value to having feet firmly planted in both military and commercial cyber worlds," Callan said of Raytheon's strategy. "If you can get those two sides to work together, you may have a winning advantage."

With much of the business conducted in secret, it is difficult to quantify the commercial cyber market, but there is widespread agreement that the market is expanding, he said. This creates opportunities for defense contractors who can adjust their mindset to the fast pace of tech innovation, particularly compared with the stately pace of legacy defense programs.

"It absolutely is permeable," Callan said of the cybersecurity market. "There's no barrier between civil and military."

Email: aclevenger@defensenews.com

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