U.S. Military Seeks Skilled Hackers and Crackers

The Inphidel wrote, "Hackers, and maybe even crackers, the goverment wants YOU. Seems the pentagon wants to make sure enough GEEKS are on hand to kick some technological [redacted]. Sounds like fun to me." Story at Wired; another one on the same topic at Yahoo! News was submitted by Doofus.

Comments

Don't fall for it!

[legoboy]

It's a trap!

X-Files enthusiasts, it is here we must make our united stand against diabolic government tricks.

------

Goody!

[tilly]

Military script kiddies!

"Dare we use our superior forces against our enemies to demonstrate how l33t we are? Is that fair?"

"Hell if I know, r00t the bastards!"

:-/
Ben

Cyberwars becoming a reality.

[MartyJG]

This just adds fuel to the predictions that the next world war will be fought in cyberspace.

At the moment the term 'hackers' brings nice warm thoughts of late night tinkering on the net to geeks, and a distant, unknown, but not that menacing thought to system administrators. If the government start re-training them, aren't they going to turn into something more like guerilla soldiers?

It would give hackers a bad name - I mean, worse than now.

Yes, many hackers have un-tapped skills, but taking these jobs would just bring forward a new age in warfare.

Cyberwarfare isn't like conventional warfare, where one side can simply win on bigger firepower. The net has always claimed to be a level playing field. Surely three hackers working for a third-world government (providing a decent level of resources) are as powerful as whole teams of hackers in a western-world country? It comes down to the abilities of an individual.

What's being proposed here is getting hackers to disable the enemy's defenses. This would lead to hackers aiming to turn opponents weapons back on their own country. Think about it for a minute. The more missiles you've got ready to launch on-command, the more firecrackers you've got waiting to blow-up in your face. And who's got the biggest number of firecrackers on the planet?...

It seems the US are setting out to hold the dog by the ears.

Competing with private industry for talent

[LL]

I'd really like to know what competitive salary and benefits the Air/SpaceForce (who I believe have wrestled the prize of tech-defense from the others) will offer to attract talented people from industry. Given that the insurance and big 5 accounting firms are snatching up people with half a clue about network security would the military be competitive? Perhaps they would appeal to old fashioned patriotism (which excludes all the imported talent from India/China/etc) but essentially they are trying to convince the defense firms (who do most of the balls-busting code on real-time systems) to give up their engineers. I've heard a rumor that the national labs are chock a block full of talented programmers but its hard to see them giving up 6 figure incomes and a cushy academic style job to babysit the defense system. Better still for their talents to go into a good robust design.

Fundamentally I would ask the fundamental question to what extent is a heavy-hardware offensive-oriented force necessary. While it's nice to had some muscle to back up world posturing, there are many other demands for public funds (education, health, legal aid, etc). The point about computers is that it reduces transaction costs and according to transaction economic theory, the key factors are price, opportunity and safeguards. With improved information (which includes laws, social habits, conventions, etc), safeguards can be reduced thus decreasing the price/cost for everyone. If CNN can identify potential conflicts and make world opinion unplatable for tin-pot dictators, perhaps there is less need for the iron fist and more for velvet diplomacy (not that I'm accusing the US of being particularly talented in this area either).

Anyway, if people are interested in outside opinions, take a look at Cato's policy analysis, or foreign studies to broaden your views on defense matters.

LL

Right, let me get this straight...

[The Dodger]

So if you think you can assume a position in the army, don't forget that you are taking a choice in my view immoral, because nothing can transform a war in a good cause

So, you're saying that killing people is immoral, thus war is immoral, and because armies wage war, joining the army is immoral.

Now, tell me this - were NATO's actions in driving the Serbs out of Kosovo immoral? Were the Allies right when they defeated the Nazis in WWII? Should we simply disband our armed forces and live together on this world as one big happy family, embracing peace, bortherhood and friendship?

Wake up and smell the roses, pal. The world isn't a nice place. There are nasty people out there, and to defend against them, the members of the armed forces have to be ready to do unpleasant things, while the rest of us sleep peacefully in our condos and semis.

Did you know that modern bullets are designed, not to kill the target, but to maim him, so that the opponent is forced to allocate resources to evacuating and treating the casualty?

Contrary to what many people think, soldiers, on the whole, don't look forward to going to war. Who wants to put themselves in a situation where other people are likely to be trying to kill them? Yet, the members of our armed forces are prepared to risk death to protect the rest of us, while people like you witter on about how they're immoral.

A soldier's job is not to die for his country. His job is to make the other poor bastard die for his.

Here endeth the lesson in reality.

D.

Agent 0101, licensed to KILLALL -9

[Chas]

Turn me loose boss!

I'm the perfect agent to bring down WINDOWS

• World
• Institution of
• Nutcases and
• Deviants to
• Overmarket
• Whacked
• Systems

Actually, I'm no super-guru or anything. You could put me in Q&A testing as the ultimate stability tester. Turn me loose on the system and see what I can fsck up. If it CAN be fscked up, I WILL find a way to do it! Usually, completely by accident.

Oh no!

BAD HAIKU INSPIRATION!:

A government job
Sit on my butt and break things
That's my kinda job



Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

There is a good precident

[Zachary Kessin]

During WWII the Britts employed a large number of math geeks (Including Alan Turing) to decrypt the German codes. (Enigma etc). This probably won the war for the allies. It was also responsable for some of the first computers.

So enlist Slashdot....

[KarMann]

Hmmm... with all these military articles lately, looks like these two might become regular characters:

Private Jones: Sir, the enemy has just brought up a web server revealing the truth about the motivations for our war. Permission to prosecute?
Sergeant Smith: Go ahead... give 'em hell!
PJ: OK... submitting enemy URL to Slashdot now.

Five minutes later...
PJ: Target eliminated, sir. Total DOS.
SS: Good work, son. There's a medal in this for you.

Good... bad... I'm the one with the gun.

Sorry, but you are wrong.

[FirstEdition]

The enigma machine was cracked by the British working in Bletchley Park (sp?) outside London. To be precise, the variant of the machine with 3 rotating tumblers and a patch board was cracked. There were other variants which were not cracked.

This is approximately how it was done:

1. The French obtained through espoinage in the early days of the war an instruction book of how to use the machine. After the French and British were not able to find anything in it to significantly assist their attacks on the enigma, the book eventually found its way to a Polish team of scientists.

2. One Polish guy had an insight on a weakness which had eluded others studying it. This weakness was a combination of the enigma design and the German standard operating procedure. The team passed the work on to the British because (a) they couldn't continue in Poland, and (b) the weakness still required a lot of brute-force checking - ie. automation was required. The British had Turing et. al. working for them. (c) the German codes changed every day, so this attack had to be run on the first interceptions of the day, every day, to be able to read the rest of the day's messages.

3. UNKNOWN TO THE ENGINEERS/MATHEMATICIANS, some code books for particular months were captured. The "management" decided to keep this info from the engineers, and to persist with the daily automated cracking as a defence against the majority of the time when they didn't have the books of keys.


So in summary, the cracking of the enigma machine was the result of a clever mathematical insight, and operational predictability to do with the initial alignment of the tumblers. This made possible a brute force attack, which was automated with banks of electro-mechanical "computers".

Interesting dilemma

[Bjarke Roune]

Hmm... I wonder what the government will do if it discovers a fatal security bug in a widely used application through this project?

I mean, if they tell everybody about it, then that really does not help them in attacking anyone...

However, if they don't tell anyone, then they have this situation:

A) There is a fatal security problem in a widely used application.

B) Knowing this gives them an advantage if they should at any time wish to be aggressive towards anyone else.

C) Software is global; People all over the world tend to use the same software, nomatter where they are physically situated.

D) If someone else knows of this problem, they will have the exact same advantage as the US army does, should this someone choose to be hostile towards american computer installations.

E) The US army knows that since they found the bug, it's possible to find this bug.

F) Any cracker/hacker in the world has a small chance of finding this fatal flaw; it's not a question of wheter this bug will be discovered by someone, it's a question of when.

-------

If all of the above is true, then by logic the below must also be true (assuming my logic is not somehow flawed, of course):

1) The US army will be witholding information that would benefit not only America as a whole, but everyone in the world that uses this software (ok, by a small degree, but still).

2) Keeping this information secret only gives the US army a transient advantage, as this bug will eventually be discovered by someone else.

3) If terroists smarten up and begin cracking instead of blowing stuff up (or behaps blowing stuff up through their cracking), then if they find this bug, they will not hesitate to exploit the possibilities this opens to them.

Imagine a terroist cracker finding a fatal flaw that works in all versions of Windows. This flaw allows him to break in and do whatever he wants to any Windows maschine.

Now, I happen to know that atleast we have an american battleship somewhere that runs windows NT... He'd have total control of this thing for atleast a few minutes, perhaps hours if he's very lucky and skilled.

Imagine what a terroist might like to do with such a ship... :(

Also, he'd probably be able to access alot of confidential information, perhaps even getting access to all the other security bugs and techniques the US army never told anyone about!


I just don't understand how people can think combat over the net can be a good thing. It leaves every country in the world very vulnerable. It opens up the possibility that one person, with enough information, acting completely on his won, can take down alot of stuff.

A group of skilled hackers could do to a country what some people thought the Y2K bug would do to the world (ok, let's say a small country :).

All that this requires is that they find enough security errors in programs in wide use, preferably an OS.

Of course, this hasn't happened yet, which would seem to indicate that it will never happen.

I don't find that argument very good, as this simply tells us that the crackers we are facing today are not really out to sabotage larger areas.

However, alot of people really, really hate (in the strongest sense possible) the US. Imagine if all fundamentalists suddenly stopped training for physical combat, and instead began learning cracking... There are alot of fundamentalists in the world, you know... And, well, fundamentalists are not known for showing restraint when they have the ability to cause harm to things and people in the USA, or anyone else they happen not to like.

Therefore, I really think what the US army should be consearned about is defending themselves. Security of computer installations is a matter of national security (for any country), and global stability.

If everyone has great defences, aggression will logically be less beneficial, and it won't be as much of a problem.

This issue will become more and more important as everyone gets more and more dependant upon technology.

W4R3Z K1DD135 UN1T3

[RAruler]

I can just see this now..

W4R3Z K1DD13: 3y3 w1ll h4x0r th3 3n3my
Army d00d: Okay, your target is the Iraq Military Command.
W4R3Z K1DD13: 3y3 w1ll punt th3m
Army d00d: Uhh.. they don't use AOL
W4R3Z K1DD13 0h, 0k4y... 3y3 w1ll s3nd th3m 4 w1nd0ws v1rus
Army d00d: they're not using windows, they're using a unix server
W4R3Z K1DD13: 0h gn0! l3mm3 g0 f1nd 4n 3xpl0it
Army d00d: Out! Get the hell out of here, your not a hacker... your a lame ass script kiddie