Lockheed Martin has lifted the lid on its $10 million cyber fortress on Canberra's Wentworth Avenue ahead of tonight's official opening.
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Designed and constructed ahead of time and on budget in less than a year, the NexGen Cyber Innovation and Technology Centre is billed as the ACT's most state-of-the-art workspace.
The company has built only two other equivalent facilities: one at Gaithersburg in Maryland and the other at Farnborough near London.
Government departments and cashed-up corporates will be able to use the facility to replicate their computer networks in an offline cybernetic alternative reality where it will be possible to test them to destruction using methods modelled on real-life cyber security attacks.
Lockheed Martin's vice-president for cyber security and NexGen innovation, Curt Aubley, said thanks to the exponential growth in computer technology, the servers in Kingston were more powerful than those installed in the Maryland centre but used only a quarter of the power.
Energy conservation is taken seriously with monitoring of consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr Aubley said the centre, which is expected to also pick up business from south-east Asia , is an investment in protecting the future.
While the public generally welcomed the explosion in networking and connectivity made possible by social media and gadgets ranging from smartphones to online fridges that can do the shopping, few people were aware of the risks this new dependence represents.
Cyber is now recognised as the ''fifth domain'' for warfare. The others are land, sea, air and space.
''We are entering the era of the converged life,'' Mr Aubley said. ''In a world of hyper-connectivity you are always online. There are now 840 million people on Facebook. The attack surface - the area of vulnerability - is growing all the time.''
The new centre, which went online last year, can be engaged by commercial and government clients to meet the full range of cyber security threats.
The largest of the two major risk areas are the known threats - such as previously identified viruses, malware and trojans - that account for 80 per cent of issues and can be screened for by existing security software.
Much harder to combat is the 20 per cent of ''advanced persistent threats'' that represent something new.
These can be the product of research by large corporate organisations and national states and should ideally be identified before they can wreak havoc.
The vice-president of Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services, Linda Gooden, is to preside at the official opening.
