The United States Department of Defense, loosely referred to as “the Pentagon” because of their headquarters designed like a pentagon, is primarily in charge of national security.  We often think of them as uniformed men and women ready to defend the country at all costs.  But the Pentagon not only covers physical national security, they’re also protecting cyberspace.

There are gazillions of data produced worldwide and the Pentagon, as part of their $250 million investment, is aiming to find significance within them by decoding foreign secrets.

The Pentagon will continue with the NSA-Central Security Service Commercial Solutions Center program, which employs the government’s top cryptology specialists,  that lets companies demonstrate to the National Security Agency new commercial tools that could aid military code makers and code breakers.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the Pentagon responsible for developing new technology for military use, will benefit from the funding as it will support the Cyber-Insider Threat, or CINDER, a program that identifies network activity that is consistent with the hallmarks of cyberespionage.

According to White House officials, CINDER will run simulations of adversary missions over Defense networks to expose hidden operations to develop ways of quickly detecting advanced persistent threats that linger silently in U.S. networks to carry out strikes such as data extraction or manipulation.

“Such threats take many forms but include variants like trojaned code, backdoors in embedded systems, worms and logic bombs, all of which could prove detrimental to the warfighter if not discovered,” the CINDER website states.

Aside from CINDER, DARPA has another big data-fueled project called Insight, which fills in for the human brain to find relationships among morasses of intelligence from myriad sources.  It uses information from sensors and prediction algorithms, among other things, to support commander decision-making.

And talk about the mother of big data, in February, DARPA combined data from multiple intelligence sources to provide 135 terabytes of information–about 270 years’ worth of nonstop MP3s–to users across government, industry and academia.

The NSA also plans on using big data to fend off cyberassaults, but since this is such a daunting task, the agency is thinking about delegating some of the heavy lifting to volunteers.

“‘Vigilant Net: A Competition to Foster and Test Cyber Defense Situational Awareness at Scale’ will explore the feasibility of conducting an online contest for developing data visualizations in the defense of massive computer networks,” the White House’s agenda states.

Aside from securing big data, the government is also looking into securing mobile devices used by government employees since most of them are handling sensitive government information.  Research in Motion’s BlackBerry used to be the go-to-device for government employees but since the UK riot last year where RIM’s system was compromised, it was found out that though  Blackberry encrypts their network, the first layer of encryption uses the same key everywhere, which simply means that if one BlackBerry’s encryption was broken, any BlackBerry can also be compromised.  The government started looking into making Android devices government certified. They’re hardening the Android kernel and toughening its security.

In February of this year, the General Services Administration, which procures more than $70 billion worth of products and services a year for federal agencies such as the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, announced that if their staff requests an Apple or Android product, it will be available for them to use.