U.S. Military's Hackers

definate writes "Wired is running a story on the Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare, or JFCCNW. A multimillion dollar military task force used to attack the electronic infrastructure of their opponents."

Comments

Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[TripMaster Monkey]

From the article:

Military leaders from U.S. Strategic Command, or Stratcom, disclosed the existence of a unit called the Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare, or JFCCNW.

"JFCCNW"??? That's a terrible acronym! That's the worst thing I've heard since PCMCIA!

How about something a bit more catchy, like the League of Enduring Electronic Technicians? Or perhaps the Paramilitary Worldwide Network of Electronic Defenders?

Let's help out our country...please post your suggestions for acronyms below.

army's new slogan

[poison_reverse]

an army of one's and zero's

Restrictions?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if there will be restrictions on security patches during war-time?

Re:Restrictions?

[Aeiri]

You don't just call in sick and not patch it just because its war-time. Heck its war-time right now and I am seeing Microsoft release patches left and right.

On the other hand if you are imaginging an situation like world war, and you are worried about your stupid windows having no patches, then here is a tip - get a life, find a bunker.

I don't think you got the point of his post...

I think what he was trying to say was, since the military has a team of hackers, will the US restrict security patches during war time so that the enemy can't have secure computers, and make it easy for the military to attack them electronically.

Re:Restrictions?

[swimmar132]

Yeah, so they can send bin@laden.com a MS Word virus!!!

Or, not.

Re:Restrictions?

[Ace26_805]

Actually, in the US Govt (for which I work for repairing/patching computers) there is a loooong waiting list before your allowed to install patches. Windows XP was just recently approved to be used by the Military and SP2 will probably be another year before its been throughly tested and allowed to be used/installed. Usually for non Service Pack updates it is about a 6 month wait until "critical" patches deemed by MS are allowed to be installed and a year plus for Service Packs.

Re:Restrictions?

[qkslvrwolf]

Really? The turn around in the air force is generally no more than a coupla months...we've had SP2 for quite awhile...

Re:Restrictions?

[Koiu Lpoi]

And it's not like the Iraqi Insurgents have such a huge technological infrastructure that this would be useful against anyways.

Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Daniel Dvorkin]

"I've got to tell you we spend more time on the computer network attack business than we do on computer network defense because so many people at very high levels are interested," said former CNA commander, Air Force Maj. Gen. John Bradley ...

IOW, folks in the Echelons Beyond Reality love the idea of Matrix-style hacking of an enemy network because it's sexy and cool (even though they probably have no idea what real hacking entails) and aren't interested in the boring old-fashioned business of securing our own networks from attack. Okay, guys, here's a quick quiz: of the following possible combatants, which one has the most to lose in the event of an enemy hacker penetrating its computer security?

a) al-Qaeda
b) China
c) the United States
d) North Korea

Think fast!

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay, guys, here's a quick quiz: of the following possible combatants, which one has the most to lose in the event of an enemy hacker penetrating its computer security?
a) al-Qaeda


Are you kidding? The Bush administration's attention to details like computer security is EXACTLY why we caught Bin Laden!

Oh, wait.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[WillAffleckUW]

Okay, guys, here's a quick quiz: of the following possible combatants, which one has the most to lose in the event of an enemy hacker penetrating its computer security?

a) al-Qaeda
b) China
c) the United States
d) North Korea

Um, I'm going to guess it's not A) al-Qaeda - because they have a truly distributed net and could care less.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Sprotch]

I seriously doubt Al-Quaeda has any IT network as such. Which very possibly explains why they are so deadly: little trace. The other three are probably sufficiently bright enough not to grant access to anything moderately important over the internet. The Pentagone's web servers won't actually allow you to unleash nuclear fire upon Canada, no matter how much we wished it was possible or have seen it in movies. You're far more likely to encounter the sysadmin's porn there.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Staplerh]

My exact thoughts on reading the article. This quotation spells out the beliefs of the project leadership:

Verton said the unit's capabilities are highly classified, but he believes they can destroy networks and penetrate enemy computers to steal or manipulate data. He said they may also be able to set loose a worm to take down command-and-control systems so the enemy is unable to communicate and direct ground forces, or fire surface-to-air missiles, for example.

Pure poppycock, IMHO. Most armies infrastructures are old enough that they have backup programs. The idea that a hacker could shut down an entire air-defence grid raises eyebrows, as most likely that air-defence grid was designed before the advent of computer networks - and military leaders are wary of trusting so much equipment.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[hkb]

Uhm, all of them do, but al Qaeda to a lesser extent.

I take it you haven't audited any chinese or north korean infrastructure lately, instead opting for the "America is everything" approach.

If you want to play games -- China, arguably, has the most to lose, in terms of both military and industrial attacks.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[LnxAddct]

Well considering the levels of encryption that al-Qaeda and North Korea use and the number of laptops that are found in many terrorist hiding areas or even in the place where the terrorists responsible for 9/11 resided, I wouldn't scoff at the value of having access to their networks. It is a known fact that terrorists use PGP encryption and it's creator has written a few times about his feelings on this and distributing it for free. In the end he has always, thankfully, decided that freedom for our privacy outweighs any evil intentions that others may have. (That is an extremely rough paraphrase)
Regards,
Steve

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[mestreBimba]

You miss the real threat. The real threat is not in taking down an enemy military's command structure, but in disabling the whole country's infastructure and subsequently crashing the whole economy.

What is the economic impact of hacking a nations power grid and bringing it down? Crashing the process control on oil and other chemical refineries. With the correct techniques you can bring down the power grid, the phone system, cause toxic chemical releases.... the list goes on and on.

In economies where most process control is now digital and the in place protection for such SCADA networks rely on security through obscurity, the ability to bring a nations economy to ruins is not far fetched.....

Think bigger!

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Quixote]

I've got to tell you we spend more time on the computer network attack business

How do you attack an adversary that relies on donkeys and handwritten notes for communication?

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[LWATCDR]

Yep and these networks probably are not on the Internet. I mean think about it. You can take out a power grid now by bombing sub stations. You can take out a phone system by bombing COs. If you can get into the control networks and just shut them down you can accomplish the same goal with less lose of life. Before anyone goes off on the "only caring about your sides loses rant" remember that the US, Russia, France, the UK, Israel, and probably China can already bomb these targets with out risking any of their solders lives thanks to cruise missiles and UAVs.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[superdoo]

Anyone working at a large company, especially industrial or manufacturing companies, during the blackout in Aug 2003 knows what effect a complete power outage could have on an entire region or country. A long-term (even a week or two) outage would result in total economic shutdown.

Pretty scary...

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Aeiri]

How do you attack an adversary that relies on donkeys and handwritten notes for communication?

Well...

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[forand]

Except that isn't what they are doing from the article:

"There are some tremendous questions being raised about this," said Dietz. "On whether they (JFCCNW) have the legal mandate or the authority to shut these sites down with a defacement or a denial-of-service attack."

So while I think it would be a good thing to have access to the networks that are used against us, I don't think these are the guys doing it. They are the people who deface websites and DOS attack others. That said I believe that the NSA and other agencies do work on cracking the encrpytion of those suspected of acting against us(as well as those who don't actually act).

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[mestreBimba]

No these network do have access from the internet... you just have to go through a couple of layers to get to them.

You have to bounce from outside a corporate LAN to into the corporate LAN and from there onto the SCADA LAN.

It is possible........ I speak from personal experience.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Sheepdot]

al-Qaeda, and I'll explain why in two parts below:

The entirety of Terrorist networks is based on communication. They HAVE no structure otherwise. If you take away their ability to communicate, they lose the entire system in one fell swoop.

So, if you hack the system that stores the GPS coordinates and communication methods for contacting the Osama bin Laden's of the group, you destroy the entire organization. If you're measuring "most to lose" by which group is entirely routed out, the answer is always going to be al-Qaeda.

The second part of the equation is the actual impact a hacker can have on the US, China, etc. Hackers have already compromised US computers. The stories show up in the press and then they die just as fast. Or the military keeps quiet about them.

I probe for fun, testing web application security and trying to compromise my own PHP coded apps from time to time. One individual, like myself, is never going to be able to do anything more than perhaps compromise a few .mil domains and take a network out for a day. Perhaps I can get a PGP (used as comparison) private key or two. The US military is NOT going to go down over something as insignificant as that.

However, suppose I compromise two private keys for al-Queda staff? And I fake reports/messages? Or suppose I introduce new recruits into the organization? There's a great deal of trust in a very small group, it may not take more than a week for me (one person using the private key of someone else) to find the Osama bin Laden's of the world.

Keep in mind that these terrorist organizations don't have the luxury of a "recruit.com" and "securenetwork.mil". Instead, they have a lot of their "join us" propaganda run by individuals that are maybe once removed from the guys calling the shots.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[a!b!c!]

c) Voting machines

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Dun Malg]

Pure poppycock, IMHO. Most armies infrastructures are old enough that they have backup programs. The idea that a hacker could shut down an entire air-defence grid raises eyebrows, as most likely that air-defence grid was designed before the advent of computer networks - and military leaders are wary of trusting so much equipment.

I would say it's only mostly poppycock, really. Integrated fire control systems are very complicated. Getting a centralized radar system to effectively communicate with a half dozen SAM or AAA batteries has been the biggest nightmare of air defense system engineers for decades. The cheapest thing to upgrade on an air defense artillery system is the control hardware and software. The Chinese have been aggressively modernizing variations on a lot of older soviet designs with modern electronics. Heck, Iraq had a sophisticated air defense system linked by fiber optics (made mostly of US-made parts assembled by the Chinese). Of course, the poppycock aspect is that these types of networks are usually closed, hard-wired systems and (as you mentioned) wise commanders train their troops to operate such things manually. In the case of Iraq's IAD network, no amount of hacking would be as effective as a few properly aimed HARMs.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Mahou]

so they're like the precursors to the main character in 1984, changing and deleting info that they don't want up on the web? yay!!

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[bogado]

Atacking civil infrastructuer will cause many, many civil casualities and probably none at the militar camp. Remeber that military are prepared for acting in adverse conditions, civil hospitals, trafic, trains are not. This to me sounds much more like terrorism.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[izomiac]

Which is better, disabling the power plant or destroying it? Killing a country's computers or the people operating those computers? I'd say any kind of war has economic disadvantages, especially for the loosing side, but at least this way there's less loss of life.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[mestreBimba]

In a long campaign (war of attrition) economic ability and power becomes the key factor in deciding the victor. The Allies key component of victory over the Axis was economic. Carpetbombing of German facilities kept Germany from keeping their troops supplies, and limited production of tanks, planes and ships.

In any large long term war of the future attacking civilian infrastructure will be key as in a long term war civilian infrastrucutre becomes military infrastructure as peace time factories are converted to war time use.

How long could the US military keep moving if there are no working refineries in the US? How long would it take to exhaust exisitng reserves of tanks, planes and ammunition if you can not produce them as the power grid is down of the digitized control systems that run your factories have been compromised.

Yes attacking civilian infrastructure can be viewed as a terrorist threat, but it also becomes a key tatic in any large scale long term war. Large multi national wars end the end become wars of attrition (failing an all out nuclear scenario). Whoever can produce the most men, guns, food ammunition, ships, tanks, planes etc will eventually win. Always remembering that our ability to make modern war is dictaded by fuel supplies.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[mestreBimba]

Boy I should proof-read my posts for spelling before I push the submit button. How hard would it be to add a spell checker to ./?

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[TripMaster Monkey]

...it may not take more than a week for me (one person using the private key of someone else) to find the Osama bin Laden's of the world.


Then what the hell are you doing posting on Slashdot! Get busy and find Bin Laden!!!

Seriously, there's a $25 mil bounty on Bin laden's head (heard it was going to be doubled to $50 mil, but don't know if that happened yet). I'm guessing that if it was this easy to find Bin Laden, you (or someone else) would have done it by now. Since this hasn't happened, it would seem as if there is something wrong with your assumptions.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[bogado]

The US is not about to enter no lasting war, in fact it avoids this with all it's powers. To my understanding a "clean" war now and then is very helpful to pump the popularity of the current US president (be it Bush, Clinton or any other I can remember). A long standing war is a burden, since this would imply in too many american casualities, so the popular opinion starts to change.

I'm not sure how able this special unity will be at disabling the said infrastructures, but assuming that it could I can surely seen CNN advertising that this is a humanitarian way to solve the problem, while in my opinion is just the inverse. It will first affect all the civilians to then start affecting the military.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[bogado]

Somewhere in my edit frenzy I lost the part where I said that I agree with you, that this is surely an effective way to disable your enemy. But so is nuking everyother city, there is probably a middle ground somewhere. To me this middle ground is "don't go to war, try to reach an agreement" ^_^

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[qkslvrwolf]

You still have to get planes and people in theatre to get any sort of lasting effects, even if you're the US. This would be cheaper and just as effective if you could pull it off, plus its much easier to re-ghost (or equivilant) a hard drive than it is to rebuild a building, install new hardware, etc. And of course, there is always that nagging human life question. So if we could actually pull this off, it would be much better than warheads on foreheads.

PS. Trust me. Russia, France, UK, Israel and Chnia may have some sort of stand off capability, but it isn't crap to the US. We could beat any (and, given enough ammo, every) military in the world without breaking a sweat. NATO countries complain it costs to much to keep up with us. We are scary, and we are sick. Chinas working on it, but they can't even see us yet, let alone touch us. They will be able to in the future, though. Especially when we waste money on shit like star wars and iraq.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Reziac]

Back in the early days, most computer viruses came from eastern Europe, and largely from Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Some virus experts said this was because these viruses were intended to disable or at least inconvenience Soviet infrastructure, as a practical form of resistance.

So it's not like the concept is exactly new or different; it's just been extended to a wider target (and I doubt we're the only country such with a dedicated hacker group).

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Couldn'tCareLess]

Well, if they don't care at all they couldn't care any less. Could they?

And I should know.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[qkslvrwolf]

Hate to break this to ya, dude, but Iraq is already very much a long standing war. We're pushing two years (half our involvement in WWII), and our actual monetary expenditures, in terms of percentage of GDP, are probably beginning to push it too.
As for fighting long term...we could break anyones military in pretty short order. Its holding the country that we can't do easily.
Again, though, if we want to make a point, better to make it by denying somebody power for a few hours and then restoring it then blowing the shit out of a power station, even if it is just for a "clean" war.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[rikkards]

The Unclass networks are connected. But when you get into the C2 networks those are usually separated from the Weeb.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[bogado]

And that's what is all about in the end, controll every one (if you only have the resources)? If this is all about it I woudn't blame half of the world for hating you.

Iraq was a bad idea from start, just to help some companies to make a few bucks and the spetacular capture of Saddam that surely helped Bush win a second term. Now you're in a no-win situation, if you leave Iraq the country will most surely turn to chaos in no time, if you stay more americans will die and more dollars will go into ocupation forces. I am sure that this will take much more time until you can finaly leave Iraq.

<irony>Well at least Bush was reelected so the war was not tottaly in vain... </irony>

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[LWATCDR]

The UK has Tomahawks that they bought from the US. Russia has some very good cruise missiles. Some like the Shipwreck are much tougher to take out even if shorter ranged than the US versions.

Don't be too sure about how weak those standoff systems are. The US's air defense really is very sad. Almost no SAM sites to protect major cities, ADC gone and turned over to the Air National Guard our SOSUS and anti sub aircraft have not been updated in years, and the S-3 ASW air craft is retired. One has to wonder if someday some nut case with a used Soviet sub and a few cruise missiles will take out a few choice targets in New York or LA just to get our attention.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Dun Malg]

One has to wonder if someday some nut case with a used Soviet sub and a few cruise missiles will take out a few choice targets in New York or LA just to get our attention.

I think they're banking on the fact that it would take several dozen nutcases to actually operate such a submarine, and that it would take several months of work to get any of those old Russian subs seaworthy. This would provide quite a number of opportunities to (ahem) "intervene" before it came down to needing any significant ASW assets.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[LWATCDR]

I was thinking a national nutcase like North Korea. They have some Romeo class subs and I have heard that they may buy some Kilo class subs. Even an airliner could be modified to launch a cruise missile or two. Does North Korea have a national airline? Do they fly to say Mexico?
What about a container ship? Like I said the US has no real air defense anymore. If it did how could an hijacked airliner make it to the Pentagon after two airliners had already hit the WTCs? Heck the USAF could not even intercept the one that the passengers took out. The only asset the USAF had in the area to track it was a transport!

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Syncdata]

Like I said the US has no real air defense anymore
Anymore? When did we ever have one?

I draw your attention to the ABM treaty, a glittering example of diplomatic retardation

Oh, it was at least understandable when we were in a nuclear standoff against the singular USSR, but it's after-effects have lead to our current prediciment

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[LWATCDR]

At onetime we had many fixed Nike sites. The Air Force had a dedicated Air Defense Command that was the equal to SAC and TAC.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[nathanm]

Heck, Iraq had a sophisticated air defense system linked by fiber optics (made mostly of US-made parts assembled by the Chinese). Of course, the poppycock aspect is that these types of networks are usually closed, hard-wired systems and (as you mentioned) wise commanders train their troops to operate such things manually. In the case of Iraq's IAD network, no amount of hacking would be as effective as a few properly aimed HARMs.

Actually the Iraqi IAD was Soviet designed and built, and they used the Soviets' highly rigid doctrine & tactics. That meant their command & control was highly centralized and they discouraged commanders from thinking outside the box.

That was a weakness we exploited in the Gulf War by severing the comm links between Baghdad and the four main air defense installations. F-117s destroyed them on the 1st night with 2000 lb laser guided bombs. Saddam and his generals didn't know what was happening and field commanders were reluctant to make any independent decisions.

The latter trait is a bad habit we're trying to break today among Iraqi officers. The current war in Iraq is being called a squad leaders' war, since they're making many of the crucial day-to-day decisions. NCOs and officers in the US military are given a lot of flexibility to accomplish their missions. This concept (called "empowerment" in the business world) is known as centralized command, decentralized execution.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Sheepdot]

No one has the leads that the military does. I'm just saying that extraordinary "hackers" such as the military may claim to have could probably do such a feat.

Re:Revealing (and scary) line from TFA

[Flendon]

It was first thought that blaster caused the 2003 blackout for the USA. While it played a role (delaying several major reporting systems that should have alerted plant officials in time to trigger failsafes) it never touched the direct controls of the plant. Slammer did penetrate deep into the Davis-Besse nuclear plant, but by luck the plant had a 6-by-5-inch hole in the plant's reactor head (Never thought I could say that about a hole in a nuke plant), so was already shutdown.

Script Kiddies in Uniform

[Flywheels of Fire]

From TFA:"There are some tremendous questions being raised about this," said Dietz. "On whether they (JFCCNW) have the legal mandate or the authority to shut these sites down with a defacement or a denial-of-service attack."

According to TFA, the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites that don't portray America in good light.

It is going to be more of a PR-damage limitation excercise than anything else. And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[ScentCone]

Script Kiddies in Uniform

I don't think you'd want these people using all of their resources to attack your network. Script kiddies, they're not.

And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.

Yup, because the bad guys are doing exactly the same thing. And you'll never have a better bunch of people to work on countering that sort of stuff than the people who have done a stint entirely focused on causing damage elsewhere. Who would you want taking a new job working on infrastructure protection: the kid right out of IT school, or the guy who's been working without any distraction or budget tightwaddedness who's just spent the last two years thinking up every way he can to crack and damage networks, content, databases, and more?

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[shreevatsa]

According to TFA, the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites that don't portray America in good light.
They could do it more easily, and save some money -- just post it on slashdot, and it gets slashdotted.
Well, maybe the site wasn't any News for Nerds, but you can be sure /. will accept it anyway :)

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[Guano_Jim]

According to TFA, the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites that don't portray America in good light.

It is going to be more of a PR-damage limitation excercise than anything else. And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.


Until they start going after opposition sites like Daily Kos or Eschaton because they're critical of the current administration. Collateral damage in the War on Terror, you know.

Don't think it could happen here? GOP Denial of Service attack on New Hampshire Democratic Phone Bank

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[xiaomonkey]

I'm not sure if this will make problems with script kiddies better or worse (script kiddies being one of the major subpopulations out there that would be attracted to a unit like this).

On the one hand, while in the military, they will be temporarily distracted from trying to "0wn" every Windows 98 box on the net.

However, afterwards, after their service to the military is completed, they might be better trained to cause more substantial damage.

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[Quixote]

the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites....

... just like Slashdot ;-)

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[Albio]

Then again after their service is completed, they may be more mature and disciplined having been in the military.

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[MyLongNickName]

Must be doing a great job, because I haven't seen an anti-Bush website in YEARS!

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[Chi Hsuan Men]

According to TFA, the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites that don't portray America in good light.

Actually, that's your paranoid, Orwellian interpretation of the article. Here is some actual text from TFA:

(Regarding the public execution of Nick Berg)

"The debate focused on whether the United States should shut down a website as soon as it posts such brutality.

"There are some tremendous questions being raised about this," said Dietz. "On whether they (JFCCNW) have the legal mandate or the authority to shut these sites down with a defacement or a denial-of-service attack."

So, it sounds like this is an issue that is being treated with some sensitivity; however, you would rather portray the group as a censorship brute squad.

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because the military are always so mature and disciplined, never looting, massacring, raping, failing to follow orders, showing incompetence, or just plain screwing around.

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[DeadChobi]

You've got to be joking. Please tell me you're being sarcastically patriotic and that you're not serious about giving up America's ideals to preserve America? Honestly, if you're going to fight for freedom of speech, you have to fight for everyone's freedom to speak, and not just your own. I agree that it would be acceptable to use them to bring down the terrorist infrastructure, but when you start talking about their public websites, that's when you cross the line. Where does the line between angry semi-militant Blogger and anti-government terrorist start then?
--rant--
And another thing. Why do people insist that America's more idealistically based rights, like that of due process or freedom of speech, are only rights that belong to Americans, and that it's perfectly acceptable to deny them to anyone who does not share this soil? The entire concept of INTRINSIC HUMAN RIGHTS being denied to everyone but those in your country is preposterous.
--/rant--

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[wx327]

According to TFA, the main task of JFCCNW is to bring down websites that don't portray America in good light.

It is going to be more of a PR-damage limitation excercise than anything else. And a good way to spend millions of taxpayer money.

Wouldn't we accomplish the same thing at a lower cost by /.-ing these sites?

Re:Script Kiddies in Uniform

[RailGunner]

They can't be doing that great - CNN.com is still up and running.

Once again

[proteonic]

science fiction slowly becomes reality.

article correction

[Triumph The Insult C]

the article refers to the JFCCNW as being the "... most formibidable hacker posse. Ever."

looks like www.jfccnw.mil is offline ... so maybe the editors need to take anothNO CARRIER

Re:article correction

[slashzero]

NO CARRIER? Does anyone actually know what that is anymore...

Primary tatic

[SpongeBobLinuxPants]

Dear Habib,
My name is Akmar and I have just inherited $3 million, but it is stuck in a US bank account....

Re:Primary tatic

[chadjg]

The above comment is rightly moderated as funny, but it could also be "insightful." If some of these smart guys can penetrate a terrorist group's networks, set up a scam, and then get Habib and Akmar to start fighting eachother when the $onlyanidiowouldbelieveit doesn't show up, so much the better.

Now, since we're pretty much defining "terrorist" rather broadly these days, who knows what will happen.

Re:Primary tatic

[bcattwoo]

Or how about:

Dear Osama,

We at PayPal value your business. During a recent system upgrade some customer data may have been lost. Please click on the following link http://www.JFCCNW.mil/paypal.html to confirm your account data.

Thank you, Paypal customer service

Bring down your enemy

[rob_levine]

Don't tell me - they are going to remotely deploy WinXP Service Pack 2 on the enemy's network?

Masterful...

Re:Bring down your enemy

[kabocox]

Don't tell me - they are going to remotely deploy WinXP Service Pack 2 on the enemy's network?

Masterful...

Yeah, they've even got a techique of deploying it onto any flavor unix/linux/bsd. It's their version of an atomic bomb.

I can see the recruitment ads now...

[edunbar93]

b3 4ll j00 c4N B3!

J01n t3h 4RmY! T1s 133t!

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about Worldwide Online Operations Team ?

Not anymore...

[zappepcs]

...a super-secret, multimillion-dollar weapons program that may be ready to launch bloodless cyberwar against enemy networks -- from electric grids to telephone nets.

Not anymore

SAMs?

[lachlan76]

He said they may also be able to set loose a worm to take down command-and-control systems so the enemy is unable to communicate and direct ground forces, or fire surface-to-air missiles, for example.

These things are connected to the internet?

Re:SAMs?

[jobsagoodun]

These things are connected to the internet?

Indeed. The article was a bit too Dan Brown really.

Re:SAMs?

[Triumph The Insult C]

hopefully not ...

but, they are probably using some communication network for command & control that is easily penetrated ... satellites especially

Re:SAMs?

[Kipsaysso]

Yeah. But they are protected by the Windows Firewall so you can forget getting to them. Those extra security features will stop the terrorists every time.

Re:SAMs?

[Anonymous Coward]

These things are connected to the internet?

Let me see....

Welcome
You've got arms.

Yep!

Re:SAMs?

[Der Krazy Kraut]

All that stuff don't neccesarily have to be connected to the internet. They could always bring some specialists behind the front lines who hack it on site or set up a relay of some kind so it can be accessed from behind the front lines.

Re:SAMs?

[peragrin]

These things are connected to the internet?

isn't everything? I know I connect our bluegene supercomputer to the regular net. of course beta testing Windows for High performace computing, I got a virus which turned it into a massive spam relay.

Do yo know how much spam you can send with a pair a t-3's the world's fastest supercomputer?

Re:SAMs?

[iggymanz]

er, if you have specialist on site at an enemy SAM launch facility wouldn't it be somewhat more sensible easier to say, maybe, destroy the missiles or launch control or tracking system?

Re:SAMs?

[erlenic]

Destroying it outright makes them aware that it's disabled, possibly giving them time to bring a backup on line. If you hack it to not work, they won't know until it's too late.

Re:SAMs?

[Der Krazy Kraut]

Dunno, depends on the situation I guess? Obviously, you would only bring them in where it's actually worthwhile to have control over the enemy's systems or have them malfunctioning at will, not to destroy a launch site which could easily be destroyed with exlosives.

But IANAG (I Am Not A General).

Re:SAMs?

[bcmm]

Fun fun fun!
r>You wouldn't want to stop them firing! You'd want to fire randomly into the air, and make patterns and stuff...

Re:SAMs?

[Craig_P92669]

A well targeted EM pulse would be much safer for our troops as well as more thorough.

Re:SAMs?

[Kaa]

He said they may also be able to set loose a worm to take down command-and-control systems so the enemy is unable to communicate and direct ground forces, or fire surface-to-air missiles, for example.

These things are connected to the internet?

Heh.

"The microlights had been unarmed, stripped to compensate for the weight of a console operator, a prototype deck, and a virus program called Mole IX, the first true virus in the history of cybernetics. Corto and his team had been training for the run for three years. They were through the ice, ready to inject Mole IX, when the emps went off. The Russian pulse guns threw the jockeys into electronic darkness; the Nightwings suffered systems crash, flight circuitry wiped clean. Then the lasers opened up, aiming on infrared, taking out the fragile, radar-transparent assault planes, and Corto and his dead console man fell out of a Siberian sky. Fell and kept falling...."

-- William Gibson, Neuromancer

Re:SAMs?

[WhiplashII]

Not necessarily - if you make a large change (like blow it up) it will be replaced. If you make a sublte change (so that it always misses) the enemy will continue to rely on it well into the fight - even if it does nothing!

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[jwthompson2]

Freedom's Special Computer Knights

Really?

[delta_avi_delta]

From the article

take down command-and-control systems so the enemy is unable to communicate and direct ground forces, or fire surface-to-air missiles, for example.

I find it incredible that systems like this would be on the internet. Surely something like a surface-to-air missile system is isolated from the web?

Re:Really?

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Well TFA also said that there's an unconfirmed report that members of this group infiltrated Serbia and hacked into a radar system there to generate phony signals during the NATO attacks back in the 1990's. So it sounds like these are script kiddies on steroids - US Army Rangers with notebooks loaded with all the latest hax0r t00lz.

Re:Really?

[oni]

Surely something like a surface-to-air missile system is isolated from the web?

isolated from the web? from the *web*? You don't have a clue what you're talking about. Do you?

Re:Really?

[AviLazar]

Ok, I will admit I am fairly clueless, someone prove to us that we have access to surface-to-air missile systems from the web.

Slashdot them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't we just /. them into submission?

We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[disposable60]

From TFA: Rita Katz, an expert on Islamic terror sites and director of the Washington, D.C.-based Search for International Terrorist Entities, believes a website that posts an execution should be taken out immediately. No matter what the implications are for free speech or other nation's laws, she said. (emphasis mine)

Coming soon - non-Evangelical-Republican == Terrorist.

Re:We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[pzampino]

That's quite a leap, don't you think?

Re:We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[disposable60]

For the implementers of the USA PATRIOT act? Gads, I hope so.

Re:We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[bombadier_beetle]

Ugly stuff, to be sure, but have you looked at S.I.T.E's site? It's yet another Israeli-sponsored PR hack job about how scary Muslims are.

Re:We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[Guppy06]

So... you don't think those sites should at least get permission from the victim's next of kin?

It's OK to be up in arms when the government violates your privacy by publishing video they recorded of you, but you shouldn't feel the same way when someone else does the same thing, especially when it involves using your death for their own gain?

Or does the fact that these executions are suppoed to be anti-American make everything better?

Re:We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[bombadier_beetle]

Not necessarily.

Re:We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[Nopal]

...It's yet another Israeli-sponsored PR hack job...

Shhh! What are you doing? Your leftist knee-jerk reaction comment contradicts the GP's leftist knee-jerk raction comment:

Coming soon - non-Evangelical-Republican == Terrorist.

Don't you know that you both are supposed to provide a united leap-of-logic front against the right? --

Re:We gotta protect you from IDEAS!

[disposable60]

I deplore those sites as much as anyone, but ugly as they are, apart from the evangelizing, they're not that terribly different from rotten.com, stileproject.com or the _Faces of Death_ videos that have been around for a couple of decades.

Mission creep is the normal tendency of agencies assigned to protect us, especially given an opportunity to dress it up in moralizing sanctimony.

We're certainly ones to talk, the way we flood the planet with games and movies about violent and bloody vengance, or just bloody violence, for entertainment's sake. Or is it OK if it's done in order to make a buck?

Shut down the ones over which you have legitimate jurisdiction. Agitate the proper jurisdictions to shut down the others.

Ooh!

[Esine]

Command Line Soldiers!

Re:Ooh!

[Zeebs]

The army doesn't use a whimpy command line, they have a command chain!

National insecurity & militarization of the ne

[G4from128k]

This looks like a scary, but inevitable, development. The internet is becoming too important to this country's economy. Perhaps the private sector can keep the Internet safe, but they need more vigilance and more tools to handle fast-evolving threats. The minute the government feels that the net has become a national security vulnerability, they will take steps to become the defender of that infrastructure.

Perhaps the day will come when the government deploys .mil computers to DDoS offending servers of phisher, spammers, etc.

The best defense

[wiredog]

is a good offense. Also, if you know how to attack, you also know how to defend.

Re:The best defense

[gnuman99]

Yes, it seems this works so well for things like ICBs, cruise missles, bioweapons, etc... I mean, if you know how to attach, you know how to defend?

Re:The best defense

[TheWizardOfCheese]

"The best defense is a good offense" is just a trite saying - it's not handed down from God or anything, you know. Of course there are many cases where aggression is the winning policy, but history also contains many contrary examples. Defense can be the best offense at the tactical, operational, or strategic level - wars have been won without winning a single battle.

On the other hand, professional military people are inherently biased toward offense, not merely because of their training, but because they tend to be aggressive people by nature (self-selection.) Sometimes this has caused them to serve there countries poorly. Two examples will suffice:

1) Convoy
Britain learned by bitter experience during the 16th through 18th centuries that the surest way to reduce shipping loses due to enemy action was convoy. Convoy was effective even when there were no escorts! Yet by the advent of the first world war, this knowledge was somehow forgotten or neglected. Individual captains with fast ships did not want to participate in slow convoys which they believed would make them more vulnerable. The navy approved of this view because they preferred to spend their resources actively, in a futile scouring of the endless seas, rather than passively, in protecting what was really important. Merchantmen were allowed their freedom, and the result was nearly disasterous: the U-boat campaign of the first world war came much closer to starving Britain than did that of the second. The situation was only retrieved by implementing convoy.

2) Battlecruisers
A famous example of "offense is the best defense" gone wrong. The idea of a battlecruiser was a ship with the armament of a battleship but the speed of a cruiser, maximizing the tactical qualities of movement and firepower. As this was achieved by reducing armour, the resulting ship was cheaper as well! It was a very popular idea with the naval theorists. But the battleship was a system, in which guns and armour functioned together. As Jutland demonstrated incontrovertibly, a battlecruiser could not survive in an environment with battleships, but it was not as useful for screening fleets as the several smaller cruisers it replaced.

Re:The best defense

[asdfjilk]

"The best defense is a good offense" is just a trite saying - it's not handed down from God or anything, you know.

Except that in this case, it's true. The only way to find flaws in Comm systems is to reverse engineer them, IE hack into them, unless you have source code.

On the other hand, professional military people are inherently biased toward offense, not merely because of their training, but because they tend to be aggressive people by nature

Speak for yourself. The military isn't only ground pounding soldiers anymore.

Re:The best defense

[bleckywelcky]

ICBs? Wtf are those? InterContinental Ballistic what? Pencils? Chairs? Toupees?

if you know how to attach, you know how to defend

I know how to attach a PDF to an email, so that means I can defend the country? Woot!

Re:The best defense

[dcam]

Its nice to read an insightful comment with historically accurate examples. Thanks.

Re:The best defense

[inKubus]

I thought the actual quote was "The Best Defense is Not to Offend." (Chuck Norris)

Re:JFCCNW

[circusboy]

like all those people who couldn't say that they worked for the NSA while they were buying and giving away stuff from the NSA gift shop with a big NSA logo on the side?

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[KillerDeathRobot]

Homeland Agency for the eXecution and eXtermination of Our Rivals?

US Military hackers...

[northcat]

And everyone keeps complaining about chinese or russian militaries using hackers.

Re:US Military hackers...

[halivar]

And everyone keeps complaining about chinese or russian militaries using hackers.

Well, at least we won't be training future spammers.

I hope.

Re:US Military hackers...

[northcat]

Uh, I was serious.

Re:US Military hackers...

[northcat]

The post was +4 Insightful about an hour ago (with some overrated mods) and now it came down to +3 Insightful with a troll mod and it looks like it'll go down even more. I can swear that if I had replaced "US" with "China" or "Russia", I would have stayed at +5 Insightul/Informative all along. Saying that the US might not be perfect on slashdot is like saying terrorism might not be right on an Al Qaeda forum. At least the Al Qaeda forum (if there is one) won't claim that they are fair in arguments.

(-1 Troll, here I come.)

Great

[lbmouse]

Geeks in uniforms. Isn't best Buy already trying this?

SAMs? or Coke machines and printers oh my ...

[WillAffleckUW]

These things are connected to the internet?

No, but their printers are.

You'd be surprised how useful online resources in unexpected places are. Even Coke machines have processors ...

Re:SAMs? or Coke machines and printers oh my ...

[mrseigen]

TERRIST A: "This coke is warm"
TERRIST B: "My morale lies in tatters on the open road, for without the crisp cool taste of Coca Cola I cannot plot these evil acts."

Re:SAMs? or Coke machines and printers oh my ...

[WillAffleckUW]

TERRIST B: "My morale lies in tatters on the open road, for without the crisp cool taste of Coca Cola I cannot plot these evil acts."

Ah, but just wait until Intelligent Machines pilot the WMD ...

Missile One: "I was chatting with the Coke machine, and he agreed with the Laser Printer that flying can cause sunburn, and I should consider swimming instead."

Missile Two: "Swimming? Hmm, let's go Swimming to Cambodia!"

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[jwthompson2]

People of America's New [Internet|Information|Intelligence] Commandos

Don't worry

[100lbHand]

ID4 proved a worldwide millitary operation can be coordiated using only morse code.

Re:Don't worry

[Torontoman]

And CB4 proved a rap group from the Burbs can make it big, if only for a time.

CDX

[Anonymous Coward]

You may also want to check out NSA's annual Computer Defense Exercise (CDX). Story here.

Re:CDX

[zaffir]

So they teach them how to stop an extremely obvious brute force attack?

I really hope there's more to the program than that.

Jeez, that's easy

[thewils]

Just sell them Windows.

Re:Jeez, that's easy

[WillAffleckUW]

Just sell them Windows.

That's against the Geneva Convention.

Joint...? that sounds bound for failure

[ajnsue]

Ah - any government effort that starts with "Joint" is destined to produce nothing but paperwork and studies. Just as Private industy folks recognize the term "Cross-Functional" as a death sentence. I have no doubts that the leadership of any J**** project has a general idea of what they need to say to continue to justify funding. But the likelihood of them actually producing something worthy of said funding is slim to nothing.

Re:JFCCNW

[jester22c]

High Five. ...time to brush up my resume Which branch would hire someone interested in this kind of work?

aybabtu

[Fox_1]

Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare, JFCCNW
Man what a painful acronym, however it's being disregarded for most of the article and replaced with :
Computer Network Attack, or as some military personnel refer to it, CNA. "I've got to tell you we spend more time on the computer network attack business than we do on computer network defence because so many people at very high levels are interested," said former CNA commander, Air Force Maj. Gen. John Bradley
Which is funny since the DoD was targeted:
last year nearly 75,000 times with intrusion attempts.
So what do they really have as a mission for this group?
Verton said the unit's capabilities are highly classified, but he believes they can destroy networks and penetrate enemy computers to steal or manipulate data.
Nice, a govt funded agency with little regard for the institutions it's supposed to protect (free speech and due process) or other nations sovereignty and the apparent mission plan of 13 year old script kiddies everywhere. Where's the story?

Re:aybabtu

[badfish99]

Which is funny since the DoD was targeted: last year nearly 75,000 times with intrusion attempts.

That's about 7 per hour. I get about that many probes to port 135 on my home ADSL box. Basically, they're saying "we're doing something very important, but we can't tell you what it is". It all smells like FUD to me.

The Hearing

[markmcb]

For anyone interested, here's a link to a hearing (not sure if it's the one referenced), that gives some insight into the broader goals of the the strategic command that this hacking force falls under.

Neuromancer..

[Sandbox Conspiracy]

I guess the day is fast approaching when I can plug in my Ono Sendai deck and really get iced. Here's to hoping they don't "ice" me for being a liberal agnostic atheist/ideological terrorist.

This group uses PowerBooks

[riversky]

A US military directive recently recomended all computer based intelligence personel run UNIX via the MAC OS for security reasons. I have a friend who is a low level Army guy and they all use Apple Mac PowerBooks in the tanks.

Re:This group uses PowerBooks

[REBloomfield]

I went for an interview with the US Air Force last year and they told me Unix was banned.....

Re:This group uses PowerBooks

[Salo2112]

Because using Windows on the internet is like riding a bicycle into a firefight.

Re:This group uses PowerBooks

[thgreatoz]

Liar. Source?

Re:This group uses PowerBooks

[rathehun]

I can just see the next colour scheme for iBooks - Military Green Camouflage!

R.

Re:This group uses PowerBooks

[jafac]

I write software for the Air Force (under a contractor), and Unix most certainly is *not* banned.

Re:This group uses PowerBooks

[AndersOSU]

Wait, they ride bicycles to the knife factory?

Re:This group uses PowerBooks

[thrasymachus]

That's actually so they can hack into alien motherships and upload viruses if necessary.

Re:JFCCNW

[bcmm]

WEll, he probably doesn't really work for them. Besides, he's an AC. They can't tell who he is.

Lets see... Agents from $SOMEWHERE_EVIL discover that at least one member of this team reads Slashdot! Information they could have guessed has leaked into their hands! Some sort of terrorist incident will happen because of it!

US vs Russia

[anatoxindustx]

This seems a bit like a "my gun is bigger than your gun" contest with Russia. A little over a week ago there was this article: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/10/04 28238&tid=172&tid=123&tid=95&tid=218 and now we have the "no no no, the US is better" article.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[sp3tt]

Massive Soldier Force of Technology - MSFT.

Real Genius meets Full Metal Jacket

[bitswapper]

"In simple terms and sans any military jargon, the unit could best be described as the world's most formidable hacker posse. Ever.

I've got a picture of R. Lee Ermey giving somebody shit for going into army 'hacking'...

"Hacker core?! You gotta be shitting me private! You're not a geek, you're a killer!! "

As for "most formidable", I wonder how often it comes down to "join us, or be labeled a terrorist

Re:Real Genius meets Full Metal Jacket

[sharkey]

"Let me see your w4r3z face!"

Linux

[gnuman99]

For once, at least I'm happy I'm using an open source OS like Linux. At least no single company can put keyloggers and backdoors in and everyone can detect the malware.

Anyway, if people wanted peace, why do we have (need?) a military?

Re:Linux

[TerminaMorte]

Anyway, if people wanted peace, why do we have (need?) a military?

Without a military, it's hard to have peace when people invade your country. :)

There will never be peace, nor should there be.

Re:Linux

[FudRucker]

i want peace even if it means war

Re:Linux

[9mm Censor]

People dont want peace. War is profitable.

Re:Linux

[jimicus]

Erm... no they can't. That's the whole point of a half-decent rootkit.

Of course, it means that the military have to compromise the boxes from the outside rather than the infinitely-more-convenient option of having the vendor install a backdoor in the shipping product, but that needn't be too much of a problem.

Re:Linux

[gnuman99]

I have an alarm system, a large dog, and several guns. My neighbor has none of the above. Which house would a burglar decide to break into?

A bank has armed guards, silent alarm and a big safe. Much harder target than your house, yet, people will break into it.

Anyway, you are no safer with your guns than your neighbour. Heck, you might be a lot worse. The neighbour might get away (window, etc.) if someone armed breaks in. You might chose to fight. Guess who has a higher chance of survival.

Re:Linux

[coopex]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say, no offense to the AC, that a robber has a hellva lot more incentive to break into a bank. Just my opinion though.

You are right about him being no safer than his neighbor. Hollywood movies and videogameshave shown me that alarms, even in the CIA ala Mission Impossible, can be easily defeated, guard dogs can be knocked out, ala piranha poodles in Monkey Island, and that bullets can easily be dogded or stopped entirely ala The Matrix.

Re:Linux

[JadeNB]

Without a military, it's hard to have peace when people invade your country.

With a military, you don't have peace when people invade your country, you have war. Peace will come eventually after the war, but you'd have peace of one sort or another anyway without a military, too.

There will never be peace, nor should there be.

Wow.

Wait a minute, though. If having a military creates peace, and there should never be peace, then shouldn't we disband the military?

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[ggvaidya]

Freedom's Special Computer Knights

They're French?? I thought they were American!

DDOS

[bcmm]

My theory: they are script kiddies, and they get given IP addresses by the CIA and from Echelon which they DDOS with a botnet, blocking terrorist's communications....

Ummm, yes

[wiredog]

If you don't know the characteristics of those things, and how they are use in an attack, then you don't know how to defend against them. And how do gain that knowledge? By building and testing icbm's, cruise missiles, bioweapons, etc.

BTW, the best defense against a cruise missile is a net, placed in the flight path. Of course, first you've got to know the flight path.

Re:Ummm, yes

[thoromyr]

hmmm... yeah, that works so well. That's why the US has the worst chemical defense measures of any advanced nation despite the fact we've spent much more on (semi-secretly) developing biochemical warefare.

right.

The real threat....

[mestreBimba]

The real threat from hackers of this nature lies not in their ability to hack the command and control grid of the enemy, but in their ability to crash the opossitions economy. Every major war of the last century has been won by economic might, more than by brillant stategies.

What is the impact of crashing an enemy's powersytem? A catastrophic crash of a power grid with actual physical damage to the grid is not beyond the realm of possibility. How many billions of $$$$ a day could be lost by such an attack on the US? If an enemy brings down even a small part of the grid it can cascade and bring down the whole shooting match.

Other scary possibilities..... hack the SCADA control system of a nasty chemical plant. Release a toxic gas cloud and kill thousands to hundreds of thousands of people. Hack a number of oil refineries and knock them out of production. Watch what that does to the price of doing business.

Most of the admins on such systems will tell you that the systems have no external links.... but when you ask them if there is a DB from the SCADA LAN that communicates with the coprporate LAN, well every admin and security guru that I have asked that question of, has admitted that such a DB exists. And where such a communication path exists then it can be exploited.

The next globalr war, if it ever happens, will start with a wave of pre-emptive infastructure hacks.

Re:The real threat....

[justforaday]

The next globalr war, if it ever happens, will start with a wave of pre-emptive infastructure hacks.

I guess it's already started...

Re:The real threat....

[tocs]

"Every major war of the last century has been won by economic might, more than by brillant stategies." How many "major wars" were there in the last century? Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan, Six Day War.

Re:The real threat....

[nathanm]

The real threat from hackers of this nature lies not in their ability to hack the command and control grid of the enemy, but in their ability to crash the opossitions economy.

Except that the enemies we're fighting now don't really have economies that would even be effected by hacking.

Re:The real threat....

[mestreBimba]

WWI WWII... come on they were in the last century and were the MAJOR wars

Re:The real threat....

[mestreBimba]

The enemies might not have economies for us to trash but given the right tools they can trash ours.... but again you have to look to the potential conflicts of the future. Every major government is spending $$$$ in finding exploits and shoring up their defenses against this kind of attack.

Instead of an actual war to help your economy, you launch a relatively untaceable hack attack that cripples an economic rival, and can't be directly blamed on you..... then you pick up the orders they missed and your economy grows,

The Hardest Part

[EQ]

... is getting enough of the "great" hackers the proper security clearances and compartmented accesses. You must be a US citizen, pass an SSBI Single Scope Background Investigation, FBI/DIA ivestigators contact scads of people you havent talked to in years as well as your current associates and their associates and the associates of those people as well - they go 3 nodes or more out from you. Add to that a Counter Intelligence polygraph - those are sometimes the biggest hurdles. If you try for NSA credentials, you get the joy of a Lifestyle Polygraph (the worst 6+ hours of your life, trust me on that). On top of that, getting people to move to Nebraska for some duty at Stratcom in Omaha is not all that easy a sell.

Fortunately not al the duty stations are in Nebraska, and not every hacker (used in the best sense of the word) fits the stereotypes. Its not like the movies.

There is one other source they forgot:

Contractors. Look at the big DoD contract companies, and look at the IT openings they have. Northrop Grumman (includes the old TRW people), Raytheon (includes the old Hughes people), Lockheed-Martin, Ball Aerospace (Satellite/comms guys), Titan, and a pile of smaller lesser known companies. Look at what they are hiring for. These are the only relatively secure IT jobs left in the US that are not under threat of being outsourced overseas.

Plenty of work if you can qualify for the security aspects and dont mind being reinvestigated and strapped to a polygraph every few years, on top of other voluntary restrictions you put on your freedoms in exchange for the security clearance (i.e. give up the recreational/illegal drugs, give up drinking to excess, give up gambling, and give up many of the vices the fringe of hackerdom has).

Re:The Hardest Part

[Mz6]

You hit the nail right on the head.

As a contractor living and working at Offutt AFB in Nebraska, this is by far the hardest part. If you can obtain a security clearance for some of the top level accesses, you are almost guaranteed a job especially for things such as this. Defense companies will pay top dollar for those people that have/can obtain clearances and will pay huge referral bonuses if you can refer friends to jump on board as well (up to $10,000 depending on that person's clearance).

I was lucky enough that I was able to intern with a Defense contractor in Nebraska who paid for all my clearances, my schooling and once I graduated I was offered and accepted a full time position.

The only downside is that your work is based on contracts. Many Defense contractor companies have high turnovers rates because their employees will jump on with the company that is either prime or a sub-contractor on a specific contract.

Re:The Hardest Part

[mr.newt]

Are you from Georgia or something?

Re:The Hardest Part

[Anonymous Coward]

you get the joy of a Lifestyle Polygraph

Polygraphs are useless. Astrology is just as accurate. The only value of a polygraph is scaring the subject into believing that a polygraph actually works. If a subject believes a polygraph works, they may confess something.

Aldrich Ames, a mole in the CIA, passed polygraphs for years.

Go look at antipolygraph.org.

Re:The Hardest Part

[Anonymous Cowpat]

"and give up many of the vices the fringe of hackerdom has"
Well at least you don't have to give up your girlfriend...

Re:The Hardest Part

[thoromyr]

You vastly overrate what it takes to get through an SSBI. CI scope polys are BFD. I won't argue with you on the Lifestyle, but... I really don't see them worrying about that. NSA only requires CI scope poly, not Lifestyle (perhaps you were thinking of another TLA?)

I also wonder how many people with clearances you've known and how long you've known them. Having clearance certainly didn't slow down the drinking or even stop drug usage.

Q: How many people do you think are in positions requiring TS/SCI clearance but have only had (expired) temps?

Re:The Hardest Part

[EQ]

NSA require lifestyle for certain compartments, I can attest to that. Thats how I know. I am current. And the SSBI is not difficult to pass if you've lived a clean life - it just takes a damn long time to get one completed and adjudicated unless you are fresh out of college. I agree about the CI poly - just had my "bring up" last year upon changing agencies, and as long as you havent been doing the wrong things for the "bad guys" polygraphs are nothing to sweat.

The drug usage is not at all prevalent as you infer - but maybe thats outside of the compartmented community in the "general clearance" people that dont have accesses. They are busting people for it in some of the most sensitive compartments, and the drinking is not as bad a problem as it was back in the 90's. Actually 9/11 changed a lot of that when all these Three Letter Acronym agencies got blindsided.

As for people with clearances, I've known plenty with SCI, and few of them got busted - and fewer lasted long with a drug problem - almost I knew/worked-with were military "operator" types though, and they "piss test" them pretty regularly. Comes from working on-site supporting JSOC. Enough said about those years. I'm in a pretty boring place now. And I like it that way.

I've always wondered just how effective the lifestyle polys were - they seem more rigged to make you squirm than to ensure that you are trustworthy. Lots of web sites claim them to be easily eluded, essentially voodoo science - so why do they keep using them? Especially after a lot of people like the Walkers, etc.

As far as the few hundred people holding Temps where I am? Zero. They dont have their permanent adjudication, they arent getting on the compound much less in the building.

Re:The Hardest Part

[thoromyr]

I've done clearance work (target interviews, background checks, etc.) and I can assure you that what I described is real. It is particularly bad with contractors. The problem is how long it can take for permanent adjudication. In some cases indefinite (yes, there are supposed to be time limits. Funny how those sometimes slip). When faced with work stoppage or ignoring the rules... well I might also point out that security inspections are meaningless unless unannounced and even then only if the person requesting the inspection wants the real results.

If someone gets nailed for DUI they have problems, but then again you have problems in most jobs. You get caught dealing (or even using) you are going to have problems (and again, this is true for most jobs). But that doesn't stop it from happening (I know of a specific case where a ring was busted). I wasn't trying to make it sound like it was commonplace, but in my experience it is no less common among those with clearances than those without (talking about working professionals, not college students).

Polys *are* a joke. I actually met someone who was impressed with the CI scope poly (after going through it) and that is exactly what they depend on. If you don't believe in the power of the poly -- all it does is measure physiological reactions which are so muddled that they rely on 2/3 expert opinion. And I wasn't trying to say that the NSA doesn't require lifestyle for some positions (when you are talking compartments you are allowed arbitrary requirements anyway) -- but it most certainly doesn't require it for all positions which is the implication I got from your original post.

Why are polys used (when they aren't even admissible as evidence in court)? The same reason as the SSBI. Its all a warm, fuzzy security blanket for high level administrators. The secret clearance does do some basic screening and a *basic* background check does have some screening utility as well. The rest is a waste of time (which equates to money).

If you look through the known cases of espionage you will notice that 99% share the same things in common: they had proper clearance and they were bought. Everyone has their price, its just a question of how high. The clearance scheme does little to address this being more concerned with other (generally ineffective) means of turning an individual. Blackmail, for example, is nowhere near as effective as portrayed in novels or movies.

My favorite clearance story is the (ex) drug dealer who was approved for TS/SCI. All it took was a poly. (How do you get a clearance? Don't lie. *Every* case I saw denied was due to lying.)

Beware the automatic assumption

[wiredog]

that network == internet.

Top Secret?

[UnknowingFool]

There was a hint of this group's existence during the first Gulf war. One of the reasons behind the Iraq's army total defeat was that the US crippled the communication network between Baghdad and the frontline. The story was that after the embargo was established, the US let a printer be smuggled into Iraq. Unfortunately for Iraq HQ, the printer was designated for Iraq Command and had been modified to contain and transmit a virus. The virus spread quietly throughout the network but lay undetected and dormant until the land war began. Then it started to take down the networks.

Re:Top Secret?

[Iphtashu Fitz]

Call me a skeptic but that sounds a little far-fetched. Figuring out exactly where a printer was going to be sent within the Iraqi government would be very difficut. Making sure that the printer got plugged into a system that also had access to the military command & control systems would also be a stretch. Then there's also timing - you wouldn't want the virus/worm/trojan to trigger too early or it could be detected & removed. But it would also need enough time to do its job effectively, which would be very difficult to calculate ahead of time unless you knew EXACTLY what systems to target, how to get into them, etc. Either you would have to determine the date/time to start the war far enough ahead of time to put together the bogus printer, ship it to Iraq, and let them install it, or the printer would have to be regularly checking with the outside world for a message to trigger the payload. The first approach would again be unreasonable. The second would depend on this system having access to the outside world and this behavior could be detected. Besides, what happens if the printer or the computer it's connected to happened to be powered off at the appropriate time?

Personally I'm more inclined ot believe the story told by a former member of the British SAS in the book Bravo Two Zero. It describes how SAS teams were sent into Iraq in the days before the war started. Their mission was to identify and destroy communications lines. The Iraqi's realized that radio could be intercepted so they relied on land-lines quite a bit. So destroy the land-lines and your command & control infrastructure is screwed.

Re:Top Secret?

[CracktownHts]

Sorry, this story is a hoax. 2 seconds of googling for "iraq printer virus" gets you an NYU page with all the background.

Re:Top Secret?

[liam_p]

I thought they just dropped bombs on anything that looked remotely like a communications centre (and some things which did not).

Re:Top Secret?

[Jherek Carnelian]

Iraqi Printer Virus

Hoax Alert.

It was an April Fool's Day joke in InfoWorld that some clueless reporters were suckered into believing.

http://www.soci.niu.edu/~crypt/other/adams.htm

I wonder if these were the guys...

[0kComputer]

that brought down al-jazeera.net when the US invaded Iraq? Remember the 2 week long denial of service attack and subsequent attacks after beheadings and what not?

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/030327/152/dwem2.html/

Re:I wonder if these were the guys...

[jfw3]

No, that was a retard named John Buffo that social engineered Network Solutions to redirect the site. http://wired-vig.wired.com/news/culture/0%2C1284%2 C59216%2C00.html

little fact, lots of speculation

[Gyorg_Lavode]

From the article I read: The military has an offensive computer network capability. Now we'd like to spend 2 pages guessing on what it is and does. But we're SURE that its 37337!

Hell, CNA also stands for Computer Network Assurance so I wouldn't be supprised if they're getting their wires crossed a bit (no pun intended).

As for the comments about more offense than defense, I wonder if this is because defense is probably done within programs moreso than offense.

Just my 2c.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[QuantumRiff]

Whats wrong with People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms? Is it that hard?

Beware the assumption that network means

[wiredog]

"The Internet." The phone system is also a network, as is the power grid (parts of which are phone accessible, but not internet accessible). Railroads use networked communications to control switches. So does the ATC system. All can be hacked into if you can get access to the communicatons lines and know how.

Re:National insecurity & militarization of the

[quiklane]

Perhaps the day will come when the government deploys .mil computers to DDoS offending servers of phisher, spammers, etc


Rather than the days gone by when offending servers used .mil computers to DDoS everyone else

Sarge, I Wanna Hack! HACK!! HA-A-A-A-CK!!!

[RobotRunAmok]

I got this whole Alice's Restaurant Flashback moment reading this. Sorry.

But back home in the 21st Century, am I the only one who sees this as a better-than-average recruiting effort on the part of the U.S. Army (at a time when their falling shy of their recruitment goals)? I'm guessing they are hoping scenes like this play out at recruitment stations across the fruited plain:

Wired Reader: "Um, I read how, like, the army is hiring and training all these 733t Uber-hax00rs to, like, simply own terrorist websites and shit...?"

Recruiting Officer: "Yup. Sign here."

WR: "So, like, do we get to wear baggy camo pants and high boots and put our hats on backward and shit...?"

RO: "Sure. Sign here."

WR: "Umm, so, does our brigade or garrison or whatever have, like, our own kewl insignia, like a fist holding lightning bolts or some rad shit like that...?"

RO: "Uh huh. Sign here."

WR: "What are we called, like, the '81st Cybernetic,' or the 'Electric Underground' or some cool shit like that...?"

RO: "Something like that. Sign here."

WR: "And I get to carry a gun?"

RO: "Oh, Yes. And we give you free bullets and coffee. Sign here."

WR: "Free Coffee?! D00d, I'm, like, so-o-o-o-o there! Where do I sign?"

RO (smiling): "Here, son. Sign right here."

NSA is a joint coperation

[wiredog]

DoD/CIA, and some others.

So is NRO.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[__aamcgs2220]

How about Forcefully Undulating Computer Killers with Totally Awesome Reconnaisance Devices in Zimbabwe?

Mister Anderson...

[GPLDAN]

The best part is they hired Hugo Weaving to head it up...

Re:Mister Anderson...

[Eberlin]

Mr. Anderson, it appears you have been living two lives. By day you are Thomas Anderson -- a wannabe programmer working as a minion of the local public library. You're a smarmy bastard who occasionally helps patrons and co-workers with their computer problems. By night, you are a talentless slashbot who goes by the name Eberlin. You have bashed Microsoft, SCO, and Sun Microsystems in your spare time.

One of these lives, Mr. Anderson, has a future. One of them does not. All we're asking is that you enlist in our 1337 Division and we're willing to wipe the slate clean...

Wow, sounds like a good deal. How about I give you the three-finger salute and you give me my phonecall?

Re:JFCCNW

[Craig_P92669]

Sadly, the best geeks will never make it to this group because of the pushup requirements.

Outside sources...

[Kjuib]

have been known for calling them Worldwide Technical Fighters...
WTF?.. WTF?...

What about the USAF Information Warfare Battlelab?

[GodBlessTexas]

I think the Dark Warriors at Lackland AFB's Information Warfare Battlelab in San Antonio might have something to say about this article's BS/speculation rating, if they aren't already part of the joint task force. And unlike the joint task force listed, they seem to spend a good portion of their time actually building tools and technologies to defend networks.

Re:JFCCNW

[sTalking_Goat]

Technically the USA doesn't have an Official Secrets Act, in fact we have the exact opposite. (Freedom of Information Act) it won't get you anything good though...

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

How about:

Constabulary Unit for Network Transgression Surveillance?

Big difference.

[khasim]

The fact that they have laptops does not mean they have networks.

Their laptops can be connected to the Internet and they can use regular email servers to email each other with encrypted messages.

Focusing on networks isn't going to help.

Now, what would help would be if they were using an OS that was built by a US company that worked with our government to install backdoors in the security system of that OS.

Failing that, our government would have to get crackers/hackers to focus on breaking into the OS used on those laptops or identifying the email servers used and cracking those.

Now, assuming that our government can spot the IP address of the laptop being used, that information can be used to trace the physical location of that laptop.

If you have the physical location of the terrorists ...

Cracking a laptop wouldn't be as useful as just getting the ISP's support in tracing the email packets. And in most cases, getting the ISP's support would be SO MUCH EASIER.

Even if they couldn't get the ISP's official support, it shouldn't be too difficult for them to get an agent hired by the ISP who could then drop a sniffer on the line.

But that doesn't sound as cool and high-tech as a cave full of geeks busily cracking away at terrorist networks.

Afghani Caves and IRA sleeper cells don't use P2P

[Filmwatcher888]

Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations use laptops because they are are portable, not because they like the latest technology. They need hardware that can be easily moved from point A to point B, carried under a shirt, and if really necessary, thrown against a wall for easy destruction (of course the HDD is recoverable, but not usually out in the field).

But, even they use laptops and older desktops, they don't use permanent Internet connections. Terrorist cells don't use permanently wired networks backended to the Internet. They depend on "sneakernets": floppies, removable HDDs, and some emails. This is why encryption is so important to them; their data can fall into "enemy" whenever a cell gets caught.

For example, The JFCCNW would have had no way of accessing any of the data stored on the PCs hidden in the Afghani caves. Coalition troops had ship that stuff out to get it analyzed and translated.

Re:Translation

[The Cisco Kid]

Actually that isnt what the military said. That is what the Wired author wrote.

Culture clash?

[identity0]

What I've seen of hackers (both white and black hat) doesn't lead me to think they would do well in a military envornment. Does anyone know if there has been much problems with keeping the unit discipline?

I'm not just talking about the physical fitness stuff, I mean that most hackers seem to want to "screw with the system" a little. Maybe it comes from the same urge to reverse-engineer stuff, but the hackers I've seen tend to dislike bueracracy and "keeping your head down" to not stick out, which are things the military seems to have a lot of.

There are a couple of ex-mil. guys in my LUG, but they're the 'resposible sysadmin/programmer', with maybe a touch of BOFH syndrome.

I wonder if the military is recruiting hackers directly, or training their own people to be hackers?

Re:Culture clash?

[menace3society]

Just tell them that they can be uber-leet information samurai by remaining loyal to their retainer.

Re:Culture clash?

[Anonymous Coward]

My cousin's husband is a boffin with the MoD, as far as I know he has no rank, doesn't have to parade, doesn't have to to have passed a course with an SA-80A2. etc.
Working for the military doesn't necessarily mean that you're actually a soldier

Re:Culture clash?

[MajGeek]

I don't know, I think it's possible to be intelligent/creative/a little off-kilter and still wear a uniform. The "military environment" isn't quite as monolithic and mindless as the stereotypes would have you believe.

A friend of mine thought that Marines interacted with each other and their officers with "Sir, yes sir" barked at the top of their lungs all day. It wasn't until I read Cryptonomicon that I understood why he had assumed that's what Marines were like.

There are a LOT of servicemembers working in IT keeping the military's networks up and running -- it's not all civilian contractors with long hair and nose rings (yet). While most are standard help desk jockeys, I have met a few who were an absolute pleasure to troubleshoot with. They knew their stuff cold and weren't afraid to try things without bothering the higher-ups with details until after everything was fixed. I would like to think that those hacker-types would get orders to units like this, and with the right leadership they could be pretty damned good.

Full disclosure: I'm a Marine. No, I don't kill babies...

Re:Culture clash?

[interstellar_donkey]

I was thinking the same type of thing when I first read this. I belong to the military (reservist), and I highly doubt any of my friends who are talented at this sort of thing (hacking) would bode well in a military environment.

The military does a great job acting as the "muscle" arm of foreign policy. When it comes to destroying, moving, or intimidating people and things in the physical world, the military is who you want to call. If you want a precision surgical strike to destroy a data-center, the armed forces could do that just fine.

But I don't think any branch of the military could really create an effective unit of "electronic warriors". The top down nature of the chain of command, the slow and lumbering reaction to change, and the strict discipline just doesn't mesh well with the hacker environment.

I can't imagine your typical hacker getting his head shaved and going through basic training with drill sergeants screaming at them is going to find the military the type of environment where his or her talents and creativity could be used.

What I'd like to see is the U.S. considering physical combat and information warfare two separate things; one handled by the traditional armed services and the other handled by something new, or at least as an extension of a civilian agency like the CIA.

Re:Culture clash?

[Dun Malg]

What I've seen of hackers (both white and black hat) doesn't lead me to think they would do well in a military envornment. Does anyone know if there has been much problems with keeping the unit discipline?

I doubt there's been any problem. The military has a LOT of hacker type guys. I was part of a Commodore 64 game cracking group in the army back in '87-'88, and all of us were war game/RPG/computer nerds. You don't see many guys like that in 11B (infantry), but when you get into the 97 and 98 class of Military Occupational Specialty (military intelligence) all of a sudden you're surrounded by the same kind of guys who ran the film projector and got picked on by jocks in high school. You see, the slovenly, lazy, anti-authoritarian blobs who live in their mother's basement are only a small subset of hacker types. There are enough energetic, enthusiastic, squared-away young poindexters to fill the military's needs.

I'm not just talking about the physical fitness stuff, I mean that most hackers seem to want to "screw with the system" a little.

Heh. You think people in the military don't "screw with the system"? Getting It Done in the military frequently involves a LOT of "creative rule following".

Maybe it comes from the same urge to reverse-engineer stuff, but the hackers I've seen tend to dislike bueracracy and "keeping your head down" to not stick out, which are things the military seems to have a lot of.

People like that excel in the military. The best way to get ahead is to be able to game the system and get the bureaucracy to work in your favor. As for "keeping your head down", I must say that nearly every geek-hacker type I've met was fairly quiet and unobtrusive.

I wonder if the military is recruiting hackers directly, or training their own people to be hackers?

Train their own. They ALWAYS train their own. The very last thing they want is a bunch of self-styled know-it-all's not paying attention during training. With the exception of things like foreign language training, the military very much prefers "clean slate" types. Not a chance in hell that they'd specifically look for hackers and try to recruit them.

Re:Culture clash?

[Dun Malg]

But I don't think any branch of the military could really create an effective unit of "electronic warriors".

You're kidding, right? The military pioneered electronic warfare. This specific "hacking" is not so different from what military intelligence units have been doing for decades. I myself was in communications intelligence in the army fifteen years ago, and even then we were doing similar stuff.

The top down nature of the chain of command, the slow and lumbering reaction to change, and the strict discipline just doesn't mesh well with the hacker environment.

Actually, I think it just doesn't mesh with some hackers. There are plenty out there who are fine with it. Besides, the military isn't as inflexible as you seem to think it is.

I can't imagine your typical hacker getting his head shaved and going through basic training with drill sergeants screaming at them is going to find the military the type of environment where his or her talents and creativity could be used.

Fully one third of the guys in my basic training platoon were going into communications intelligence like I was. Your imagination is not reflecting the reality I experienced.

What I'd like to see is the U.S. considering physical combat and information warfare two separate things; one handled by the traditional armed services and the other handled by something new

That's a stupid idea, particularly when the "hacking" requires things like sneaking behind enemy lines and making a "man in the middle" attack on a fiber optic line. They aren't talking about "teh IntarWeb" when they say they're training hackers. They're talking about the larger arena of wired and wireless digital communications. The most serious hacking will probably end up being done by Special Forces teams. A bunch of lazy slobs in Spock ears living with their parents aren't suited to the task.

Re:Culture clash?

[interstellar_donkey]

I wouldn't argue the point that there are pleanty of intellegent and talented soldiers in the Army (and presumably all branches of the armed forces). From my personal experience, there are quite a few geeky types. I didn't see them in basic training, but they sure came out of the woodwork in AIT, and they're all over in my unit.

I wasn't trying to put down the type of people in the military. I simply was suggesting that the environment the military fosters is counterintuitive to fostering the creative habits of several hackers.

Sure, you're going to need SF teams to go in and handle onsite hacking. (I honestly hadn't considered that, and you're absolutely right)

But I doubt any commander is going to allow one of his or her soldiers stay up all night chain smoking in front of a computer while drinking Code Red cola then crash out at dawn, missing PT and the regular duty day.

You may call them lazy slobs in Spock ears, but those lazy slobs are often some of the most talented people in figuring out how to muck things up electronically. If those lazy slobs can prove themselves to be trustworthy and serve the needs of the US, I'd rather have them handling all non field hacking then anyone like you, or me, who can tone their personality down enough to handle the discipline of the military.

I wouldn't want a soldier doing remote hacks any more then I'd want a soldier being an artist or a poet for their primary MOS. Again, I'm not saying the soldier couldn't do it, I'm simply saying that the structure and discipline of the military would probably end up curbing those talents rather then encouraging them.

Re:Culture clash?

[Goldsmith]

You may be confusing a GI (General Issue soldier) with the "special forces".

Special forces means more than just Rangers and SEALs. A friend of mine from high school was in a special forces "psychological warfare" division a few years ago. He was a graphic designer, not anything secret or all that special about it except that he had access to some really great equipment. Similarly, I used to work in fusion science, and there are a number of fusion scientests who also work for the military despite being academics. In both these cases, you have people who would never fit the typical stereotype of "military". The common denominator between them is the desire to play with the coolest toys and do the most advaced work they can (and of course, no moral qualms about the military). It's been my impression that the military is accomodating of people whose skills are necessary and unusual, yet lack that "military" persona. Remember, they're not asking these hackers to be rank and file soldiers, probably just hackers.

Re:Culture clash?

[Neurotoxic666]

I mean that most hackers seem to want to "screw with the system" a little.

What? You really think non-geeks in the army are brainwashed cannon fodder? Come on!

You can hate the system and still be in the army. You'll still get to play around with guns and learn cool stuff. A nice example would be here, in Quebec. You may know that there is some sort of a separatist movement here, and many French-speaking Quebecers have a deep hatred towards the English Canadians. Still, there are a lot of them in the Canadian army, serving (and bitching about) Her Majesty the Queen.

My point is: you can get into an organisation, play the game, obey and still hate every bit of it. Hackers would fit in the military as nicely as any redneck.

Fatal flaw

[RichardX]

The only thing the enemy would need to employ to completely overwhelm and undermine this army of nerds would be..... a female.

Re:Fatal flaw

[snotclot]

That's why the US army needs to help hook up the JFCCN(whatever you spell that) with many hot sexy femme fatale spies. However, if this happened true, the JCNN application process would be slashdotted in a second.

Slim to none

[blueZ3]

and Slim just left town :-)

When I was in the Army (82nd Airborne in the late 80s, early 90s), any "joint" training we did was always a laugh. We'd get Navy or Air Force observers along on an exercise and they'd call in "simulated" Naval gunfire or airstrikes...

But the kind of static fighting we saw in WWII, where the enemy is dug in and you have days to plan just where the strikes will be, and where you're always sure your forces are clear of those areas, is long gone. Everyone knew that then and it's more true now. What really happens is serialized: first the AF bombs the ememy's defenses to bits, the Navy does the same while tossing cruise missiles, and then AFTER that the Army moves in. Close air support these days is Spectre gunships and helicopters. Both piloted by Army-types.

"Joint" efforts are pretty meaningless, in my experience, and I'd predict this is likely to be the same

Re:Sarge, I Wanna Hack! HACK!! HA-A-A-A-CK!!!

[sharkey]

I got this whole Alice's Restaurant Flashback moment reading this.

You can hack
whatever you want
at Alice's Restaurant!

Better Watch Out for The Russians....

[Shadow_139]

This may be the start of another ColdWar....,

With Russians claiming to be the best in the World ...,
and China, Korea not far behind....
Can the US keep up..., with all the problems with NASA

The winner is..

[TiggertheMad]

al-qaeda. The Us and china are huge. You can't destroy the entire country witha single computer hack. Oh, sure, you can make life difficult if you turn off power to new york for a few hours, but on the grand scale, that is really nothing.

NK is so far behind in technological development, that they probably don't have that much online yet. I don't see Kim pouring millions into buinding a massive backbone to give the slaves access to the intArwEb. It's possible that their military has a computer network, but I'm going to guess that it probably isn't hooked up to the outside intArwEb. Just a hunch, but I could be wrong.

al-quaeda is a very small group of people, which means that if you compromise the right computer, you might get all their vital information. They work in cells, but if you grab the data from someone near the top, you might get bin laden's phone number, along with the numbers of key cell organizers.

Re:The winner is..

[qkslvrwolf]

Yeah, they're about a bijillion years behind, but http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,59043,00 .html

Re:JFCCNW

[ScentCone]

Technically the USA doesn't have an Official Secrets Act, in fact we have the exact opposite. (Freedom of Information Act) it won't get you anything good though...

Well, we do have the Uniform Code Of Military Justice, and other civilian-facing statutes that absolutely do dictate what your limitations are when you sign up to do classified work. The FOIA certainly will get you "good" stuff, just not in a hurry. That's the whole point. If it was that simple to get everything "good" (by which I have to assume you mean technically cool, etc), then of course everything that the NSA knows how to do would also be in the hands of the North Koreans, etc.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Freexe]

Please god say that isn;t really a valid perl script

Re:JFCCNW

[Col. Bloodnok]

I can mention that I work on a government project covered by the Official Secrets Act, but that is about the sum of it.

Excellent. I'm putting that on my CV. :)

It certainly looks better than:

'For the last 18 months I have mostly been drinking beer and playing computer games.'

best defense is a pre-emptive strike.

[TiggertheMad]

Yes, it seems this works so well for things like ICBs, cruise missles, bioweapons, etc... I mean, if you know how to attach, you know how to defend?

We have learned from building massive weapons of mass destruction, that a good defense would be very deep sealed bunkers.

Re:best defense is a pre-emptive strike.

[Tassach]

a good defense would be very deep sealed bunkers

Like mine shafts? Mr. President, we must not allow a mine-shaft gap!

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Anonymous Coward]

Federal Unary Computer Killers
With the following divisions:
Middle East
Internal Technology
Oversea's Fighting Force

and of course, where do they train....
Yahoo Operations University

I knew it!

[prurientknave]

Slashdot is their weapon of mass destruction and the editors have always secretly made this known!

Why else would they have military titles like Commander Taco and Commander Gravy.
<_<
>_>
run for the hills!

Mod parent down-malicious code in sig

[JLavezzo]

The Perl code in [Gob Blesh It]'s sig is a recursive delete.
Mod him down. Script Kiddie deserves no Karma.

Re:Mod parent down-malicious code in sig

[alpha_foobar]

I think it depends... obviously since he is passing the command as an argument to perl to interpret and providing the full application command line for this to be done... then many people will try and run it to see what it does.

But this is silly two ways, firstly for doing it... secondly for doing it while you are sitting in permission mode that allows you to run it with serious problems evolving.

I.e. if you want to do something stupid to your machine, the very least you could do is set up a test environment on your machine and try it (and anything else you can't resist) there... i.e. a special user with very low permissions or try it in a VMWare session.

Obviously this isn't fool proof, because if you try everything that looks strange, eventually you are going to try something designed to break the sandbox you have created...

However, obfuscated perl (or regular perl) looks interesting.

Not necessarily.

[khasim]

So it sounds like these are script kiddies on steroids - US Army Rangers with notebooks loaded with all the latest hax0r t00lz.

In that particular instance, a laptop with tools would be a bad idea. A better idea would be a self contained unit built specifically for that purpose for that model of radar.

In which case, the people deploying it would not need to know much about the system. Just how to identify the correct wires and how to splice the unit into them. In theory, any commo guy could do that, with a bit more training.

Re:Not necessarily.

[UberOogie]

But if you already have an army ranger on site, why hack the system so it doesn't work? Why not just, you know, blow it up?

ha!

[GregoryD]

So that's what Mitnick has been up to.

Prison! Ha!

We've been socially engineered

Re:JFCCNW

[ghukov]

doesnt just about everything these days?

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[demo9orgon]

Just how does the military end up with such uninspired, soul withering, marginalized and obfuscated acronyms?

My understanding is that officers are usually tasked with creating acronyms for the projects they are responsible for. This would be in keeping with the fact that they have to do all the documentation and write ups on it. Now, we're living in a politically correct world where you don't want someone twisting your acronym up and side-banding your project with potty humor. And you sure as hell don't want to offend some female (women wield a startling amount of power in the military when it comes to decorum) officer who might have to say it.

So something as intellectually neutered as JFCCNW is actually the kind of acronym that a smart person would like to see in their dossier. Over time, as an officers dossier is reviewed, part of the whole "reading the entrails" to see if an officer is suitable comes down to how well they work within the bureaucracy, and to this end I've known officers who have been promoted for such things. It's a whacked planet.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[eurostar]

"Electronic Defenders" ?? from who ?? more like "Electronic Attackers" bud.

This should have been obvious

[TiggertheMad]

I have been saying since the early nineties that there is some sort of black-ops hacker team that the government funds. I would be seriously upset if my tax dollars wern't being spent on making sure that we had this sort of capability.

I'm guessing that they are mostly civilians working for the NSA and CIA with close ties to the military. I'm saying mostly civilian, as the military doesn't usually attract people with multiple degrees in advanced technical subjects. They will work closely with the teams, though, providing military intilligence to augment what the civilian agencies provide. They will be set up in small 'fire teams', so when they need to go to work, they can be assigned to seperate specific targets. During peacetime they will be constantly practicing intrusion techniques on each other, wargamming various scenarios. I'd say that they won't be ex-blackhats, as they aren't very reliable. Probably young-ish college graduates with masters degrees that are very dedicated and focused individuals. (Think FBI or CIA agent in mentality: highly reliable team players, not hot shot hackers.)

I think it sounds like very interesting work. If any of them read this posting, contact me. I don't need to tell you how, because I'm sure you can find me... ;-)

Donkies and Notes?

[Flamsmark]

with carrots, flies, and ink-eradicators, of course.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Aphoric]

I am sure that it has already been registered with the Federal Acronym Registration Team

I am not speaking of

[mestreBimba]

random small incidents from loosley organized groups.....

You will know this has happened when most of the lights in the country go out.......

Every major nation on the planet now has a cadre of hackers whose sole purpose in life is to probe, reverse engineer, and come up with exploits for the other nations critical infrastructure.

IMO the next major global war will start with a huge wave of hacking attacks. If you remove your enemy's ability to wage a long term war, in the begining of the battle, then you are a long way towards victory.

From dictionary.com:

[conebrid]

acronym, n., A word formed from the initial letters of a name, such as WAC for Women's Army Corps, or by combining initial letters or parts of a series of words, such as radar for radio detecting and ranging.

Doesn't look like it needs to be pronounceable to be an acronym.

Re:From dictionary.com:

[Mahou]

A word
i dont know what language you speak but generally words are pronounceable

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[FinalCut]

JFCCNW is not an acronym. Oh sure, people love to say everything that consists of the first letter of each word is an acronym - but this isnt.

Acronym - a new word or pronounceable and hence memorable name coined from the first or first few letters or parts of a phrase or compound term (HUD for Housing and Urban Development).

About all JFCCNW does is take the first letter from a bunch of words. It is certainly not pronouncable, nor is it particularly memorable.

Not only are your acronym's funnier, but they are actually acronyms.

Or maybe this is pronounced Jiff-canoe ('jif? - k&-'nü)

Re:just goes to show

[demo9orgon]

No, it just goes to show that all governments hate competition, at every level. You can't just point at the USGOV and wrap it in a razorwire blanket and say

"HA! That proves it!".

Every government on the planet is rotten. They all act the same. Think of businesses with no accountability except that which they're willing to suffer. Unlike businessess, where if they're all wrong they're all right, governments just say,

"We're right. Disagree and you might limp away marginalized. Piss us off and we'll shoot you/imprison you."

Humanity, like all life and existence, is built upon recursive suffering. Death is the exit condition. It's all a game. The 10% control the 90% and short of re-engineering humanity and really most mamillian life, it's not going to change.

Go get a hug. Depending on how well you take care of yourself it's about the closest thing to an equivalent exchange of suffering our existence offers.

Cheers.

super secret?

[FudRucker]

RE:[a super-secret, multimillion-dollar weapons program that may be ready to launch bloodless cyberwar against enemy networks -- from electric grids to telephone nets.]
well it is not a secret anymore. i read about it on slashdot & wired.com

This is all fine and well

[mestreBimba]

until China (Population as of 2002 1.2 billion and growing) and India (who is expected to overtake China as the worlds most populous nation by 2035) decide they need more resources and space for their people.

Or if China's sabre rattling in regards to Taiwan ever turns into something more.

Yes long term wars are unpopular. So was WWI and WWII, yet somehow in the end, despite all of our isolationist policies, we became involved directly in long lasting wars. We do not have to start it, but a long drawn out multi national war is never beyond the realm of possibility.

Re:This is all fine and well

[bogado]

Do you think the US would face china, india or any other strong countrie directly? I doubt it. And the inverse is also true, I don't think is a direct interest in creating a war for neither china and much less for india. I would expect a second cold war in the worst case.

out of curiosity, where did you taken your nick from? I would swear it is from a fellow Brasilian. :-)

Re:This is all fine and well

[mestreBimba]

Yes, I do not think such a war is in any nations best interest.... but with two rapidly emerging nations, both with growing populations and economies sharing a border, well who knows.

apelido vem de mestre Bimba criador do capoeira regional.

O meu mano, o que foi que tu via la?
Eu vi Capoeira matando, tambem vi maculele!

(coro)
Capoeira, E jogo praticado na terra de Sao Salvador!
Capoeira, E jogo praticado na terra de Sao Salvador!

Mas sou aluno que aprende, e mestre que da licao,
Na roda de capoeira nunca dei golpe em vao!

(coro)

O Manuel dos Reis Machado, ele e fenomenal!
Ele e o Mestre Bimba, criador da regional.

(coro)

A capoeira e luta nossa, da era colonial.
Nasceu foi na Bahia, angola e regional

Mas, na verdade nao sou Brasileiro.....
mas pratico capoeira, e ja morava no Brasil por dois anos, e minha esposa e' brasileira e falo muito Portuguese....

Re:This is all fine and well

[bogado]

cool. :-) It's always nice to see my own culture being apreciated by foreingers. :-D I, myself, do not know much capoeira, but it is a very beautiful dance (I am not sure how effective it is as martial art though).

Re:This is all fine and well

[the original m0nk]

as far as its effectiveness as a martial art, just ask eddie gordo. he kicks all types and kinds of ass in the iron fist tournaments.

SlashCommand

[RedLaggedTeut]

I'm kind of surprised that noone has pointed out yet the existance of one division of JFCCWOTEVR led by Cmdr. Taco that harnesses the power of distributed monkeys for denial of service attacks.

Re:just goes to show

[Adult film producer]

Really, I don't disagree with your assessment that all governments are rotten, corrupt and power hungry institutions. But that's not the same as saying they are all dangerous. The Canadian government *could* be dangerous.. but on a global scale of 1 to 10, I'd rate it a 2. Whereas the u.s. goverment is dangerous and it's proving to us right now how out of control it is.

War with Iran will start fairly soon and George Bush "has war on his mind." He leads a great nation, I've visited the u.s. many times and loved every bit of it, but I have very little confidence that george bush understands the responsibility that he holds as president of the u.s. and to the world (ie. Nuclear & Economic power.) The game he's involved in is way out of his league..

I just hope there are safeguards to prevent that brain damaged lunatic from using the nuclear button.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[jotok]

It was a PCMCIA joke. Like TWAIN (Tool Without An Interesting Name).

You hear that wooshing sound? That was...ah, nevermind, go and get your coffee :)

That depends upon the mission.

[khasim]

If you blow it up, they'll deploy a less effective secondary system (I'm sure they have vehicle mounted systems like we do).

If you can have them process bad data, they won't necessarily know that their system has been compromised and they'll have to keep reacting to the bad data (or miss the good data in the noise of the bad data).

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[nilptr46]

How about the Non-Operative Obsolete Battalion?

Re:I have a friend....

[suman28]

This is hard to believe, since HR dept companies (in US anyway) cannot disclose any other information other than what the person worked as and how long. As for your references, they can be tell the new company any BS they want. So, I wonder how they got away with telling about why they fired him.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Country n' Western.

That's why they call 'em computer cowboys, son.

Not neccessarily THROUGH the Internet

[DesScorp]

There are other ways to conduct "information warfare" against the enemy, as we have probably done before. From the article:

One story widely reported, but never confirmed, described how a team of military ops was dropped into Serbia, and after cutting a wire leading to a major radar hub, planted a device that emitted phantom targets on Serb radar.

So it's a good bet these guys aren't just sitting at a desk playing nethack. Some of them are probably special-ops types with additional computer training. I can easily see operations where we'd drop in sabotage units via aircraft or submarines, and hose entire infrastructures by accessing them locally, just like the Serbian incident. Keep in mind that in modern air defense systems, often multiple units are connected in clusters, sometimes relying on just one radar dish per 3-5 missle units, all connected electronically. Hose the radar, and you've fucked the entire cluster. And while military communications networks usually aren't connected to the Internet on the battlefield, they ARE becoming more and more computer dependant. So it wouldn't be improbable to imagine some of these guys tracking down the right coax cables connected underground to a command and control bunker somewhere, then attaching a vampire tap to access the network.

Uh, sorry no

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a low level Army guy (Gunner) in the 1st Cavalry. We don't use Powerbooks in the tanks because shiny/bright colors make us targets.

We actually use hardened CP/M machines running a modified version of Windows 3.1. These feature a dual Dragonball CPU setup for redundancy and use a special TRIMARK backplane for the bus. Back at command they use ENIACs with modified EMARK (ethermark) connectors tied into the DB2 back-end for managing field operations.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[mizhi]

Cute. Hats off to you.

I wonder how many people actually ran that?

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Zemplar]

you missed...
National Electronic Research and Defense Service

Gentlemen! You can't fight here!

[wiredog]

This is the War Room!

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Reziac]

I think they got it here.

And did anyone else immediately hear "United Network Command for Law Enforcement" ??

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[grishnav]

Command Line Infantry

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[torpor]

Farking Secret Computer Knerds.

Very broad definition of 'cyber' isn't it?

[gelfling]

Pretty much anything you can plug in and break by non explosive traditionally military means seems to fit their definition. Like when ChoicePoint was 'hacked' and it turned out that they were defrauded of assets just like any other scam cyber or not.

Re:They aren't countering it.

[ScentCone]

So? Who cares if the bad guys take down some websites?

It's not just about web sites, obviously. We're talking about web front ends on cricial apps, SCADA-powered water and electical plants, major financial systems upon which the economy depends. It's all in the same bucket.



Sure you would. Any jackass can kick down a barn. But it takes a carpenter to build one.

Sure, you need a carpenter. But your carpenter will do an even better job (at building a hard-to-wreck barn) if he sits down to talk with people who spend their entire day deliberately trying to wreck barns, and who know look for the weakest board to kick out. If I can expand on your analogy: a traditional carpenter might build a barn that resists the weather, keeps the hay fresh, is easy to move horses through, etc... but he wouldn't normally spend much time focusing on the likely tactics of would-be barn arsonists. He's going to assume that if someone wants to burn down that barn, it's just going to happen. We're talking, instead, about working on fireproof barns, barns under which people can't dig tunnels, and barns that are conceived of expressly to deal with issues that may not be brought up absent input from pro crackers.

So we have our own jackasses to kick down their barns to "counter" their jackasses kicking down ours? There's not much progress in that.

To the extent that bad guys swap info on public web sites, and coordinate things like multi-plane suicide attacks via web-based email... it's essential.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[wernercd]

lol that joke must have went over my head. Like I said... maybe monday has me retarded :) I still don't get it but ah well.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[mOdQuArK!]

See, you have the wrong viewpoint to be associated with this U.S. administration. "Preemptive intervention" means that to defend, you've got to attack.

Re:Looks like JFCCNW aint's so 'l337' afterall...

[kristjansson]

I think you forgot Zero Cool... been a while since I watched that comedy, tho...

I for one would like...

[laugau]

I would like to welcome our new military overlords

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Sinus0idal]

I thought it was Technology Without an Interesting Name...?

No it's not.

[khasim]

It's not just about web sites, obviously. We're talking about web front ends on cricial apps, SCADA-powered water and electical plants, major financial systems upon which the economy depends. It's all in the same bucket.

No it's not. Look at all the defaced websites out there.

Then compare that to the number of compromised Apache systems.

But your carpenter will do an even better job (at building a hard-to-wreck barn) if he sits down to talk with people who spend their entire day deliberately trying to wreck barns, and who know look for the weakest board to kick out.

That may be so, but it still takes the carpenter to build the barn.

The jackass cannot. He can only break it.

He's going to assume that if someone wants to burn down that barn, it's just going to happen.

Why would he assume that? I can see him designing a barn without paying much attention to fire control, if fire control was not a stated requirement. But a jackass wouldn't even be able to get the barn built.

We're talking, instead, about working on fireproof barns, barns under which people can't dig tunnels, and barns that are conceived of expressly to deal with issues that may not be brought up absent input from pro crackers.

That's possible. But it still gets back to needing a carpenter because the jackass cannot build the barn.

To the extent that bad guys swap info on public web sites, and coordinate things like multi-plane suicide attacks via web-based email... it's essential.

Nope.

First - you'd have to identify which sites were used by the terrorists. How do you do that?

Well, you'd have to know some terrorists or terrorist supporters and monitor their communications.

But since you know the identities of those people, why go to the time/expense of training elite military cracker teams? Why not just have an agent work for the ISP feeding the site that those people use for email?

One agent with a sniffer at the ISP can do a LOT more than dozens of crackers in a cave.

And that is the problem we're having with our current Intelligence operations. We are spending time and money on electronic means rather than getting PEOPLE into the sites where they can find the information.

The terrorists are not restricted by that. Since they don't have unlimited funding, they have to use people in critical junctions. Which is why a few of them were able to crash planes into our buildings.

We could do SO much better by spending $1million on recruiting more mid-eastern agents and sending them to tech support school and setting them up a "sleepers" in the region's ISP's than we will ever do with a cave full of geeks with Matrix delusions.

Re:No it's not.

[ScentCone]

No it's not. Look at all the defaced websites out there

I have customers (some are even offices in municipal governments) that rely heavily on public-facing web sites, as well as on intra/extra-net systems and browser-based mail. Those operations would be (and have been) really crippled by DOS and other noise. I've managed to avoid actual defacement, but I've trapped problems with older apps that have SQL pass-through vulnerabilities, that sort of thing. It's astounding how weak some of those designs are, and yes, it does take a pro to build things that are secure. I'm one of those people, so I know what you mean when you say that. But I also really like it when some Red Team finds a hole in something I'm involved with. There just aren't enough hours in the day for me to be all of those people. With national security, the scale is much, much grander. I also spend a good part of my day analyzing international attacks on my e-commerce customers. Organized crime in Russia, China, Korea, and punks in Germany, eastern Europe - all constantly rattling doorknobs and attempting mostly card-synth probes against checkout routines, etc. As long as I stay close to what the crackers are trying, it gives me info I need to keep things robust on the back end.

But since you know the identities of those people, why go to the time/expense of training elite military cracker teams? Why not just have an agent work for the ISP feeding the site that those people use for email?

Because some of them are being backed by national governments, like in Iran, Syria, and North Korea.

That being said, you'll never meet a bigger backer of more human intelligence spending. I just don't see $million spent in the white-hat-cracking department being a $million we can't spend on recruiting and handling local pro-democracy folks in the countries in question. The general populations there are already seeing the light, and desparately want change. So it's not all that hard, especially among the higher-tech circles, to find people who will help on principle, with cash being only frosting on the cake.

On the other hand, if we see a storm of, say, Syrian-government sanctioned cracks coming via, say, Germany, with ties to some action in Iran... we'd for sure want the capacity to stomp all over the networks in question and induce pure misery until it's stopped locally. Just the losses on Wall Street from one day of hobbled trading would pay for cracking fire teams for years.

Hopefully we can agree that teams of crackers are not, by themselves, a magic bullet. But I'd rather have them, and have them juiced up and ready, simply because I think it will matter if, say, China decides it wants to storm Taiwan. But by all means, we should be spending orders of magnitude more on infrastructure protection, both in the government and private sectors.

Re:In my language...

[Mahou]

hahaha, we also use made up words like beotch

Anti box cutter group?

[fuct]

Hey does any of this hacker stuff work against box cutters?

I think we could use something like that considering the attacks in the past.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[drinkypoo]

I'll believe it's not an acronym when you can tell me what it is. It's not an abbrev., so if it's not AA, what is it?

Re:JFCCNW

[crummynz]

Maybe even the JFCCNW.

Re:Accepting alice...

[drinkypoo]

Accepting alice...

Psst, the phrase is "Excepting Alice". You are stupid. Retire in shame.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Koiu Lpoi]

Quite honestly, I've never heard somebody call "Housing and Urban Development" hud. HUD is Heads Up Display. Wouldn't you be confused if someone came up to you and said "Yeah, there's so much new HUD going on around here these days."

ob. Daily Show

[TheLittleJetson]

a unit called the Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare, or NAMBLA

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Dun Malg]

Quite honestly, I've never heard somebody call "Housing and Urban Development" hud. HUD is Heads Up Display. Wouldn't you be confused if someone came up to you and said "Yeah, there's so much new HUD going on around here these days."

I think you only hear it in reference to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Likewise, "HUD" in that sense is really only used "inside the beltway" and by commentators on federal government stuff (yawn).

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Nick Harkin]

Interestingly enough, it's not actually either:

The word TWAIN is not an acronym. It comes from a quote from Rudyard Kipling's "The Ballad of East and West" - "...and never the twain shall meet...". It is meant to symbolise the problems of connecting scanners and PC's at the time. The upper case was used to make it more distinctive and this gives it the appearance of an acronym.

A contest was held to find a potential meaning for the acronym but eventually, none were used. "Technology Without An Interesting Name" was one of the entries and has been adopted by popular culture.

(Source: http://www.twain.org/ )

http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=938852

Oh, dammit

[devphil]

Look at the big DoD contract companies [...] Ball Aerospace (Satellite/comms guys)

Gaaahhh, I had almost successfully purged those memories with liquor and pr0n. Curse you!

oxymoron

[unk1911]

U.S. Military hackers - is an oxymoron... almost as funny as "Military intelligence"

--
http://unk1911.blogspot.com

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[bigsmoke]

According to the Chicago Manual of Style's FAQ, it's an initialism:

Q. I had always understood the term acronym to mean an abbreviation that spells a word, such as snafu (per Webster's), but in your manual [the fourteenth edition, 1993] the two terms are used interchangeably. Can you tell me where you get your definition of acronym?

A. Since 1993, we've realized that we needed to be more precise. In the fifteenth edition, therefore, we distinguish between acronyms, initialisms, and contractions, all under the umbrella of abbreviation, as follows: acronym refers only to terms based on the initial letters of their various elements and read as single words (NATO, AIDS); initialism to terms read as a series of letters (BBC, ATM); and contraction to abbreviations that include the first and last letters of the full word (Mr., amt.). These distinctions can also be found in the multivolume work Acronyms, Initialisms, and Abbreviations Dictionary, edited by Mary Rose Bonk and published in its twenty-seventh edition in 2000 by Gale Research Incorporated.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[drinkypoo]

Okay, now does anyone else agree with them? I'm fine with calling it that if there is consensus...

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[Foxxz]

How about M.C.N.U.G.G.E.T.
Millitant Chicken Guerella Guys Enlisted Together

-Foxxz

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[nathanm]

My understanding is that officers are usually tasked with creating acronyms for the projects they are responsible for. This would be in keeping with the fact that they have to do all the documentation and write ups on it.

Not necessarily, there are hundreds or even thousands of people involved with these types of programs. This is only one of a few Joint Functional Component Commands (JFCCs) under US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). If you read the actual Senate testimony of General Cartwright, you'll learn there are also JFCCs for:

• space and global strike
  
• intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance
  
• integrated missile defense
  
• combating weapons of mass destruction

So something as intellectually neutered as JFCCNW is actually the kind of acronym that a smart person would like to see in their dossier. Over time, as an officers dossier is reviewed, part of the whole "reading the entrails" to see if an officer is suitable comes down to how well they work within the bureaucracy, and to this end I've known officers who have been promoted for such things. It's a whacked planet.

You have no idea what you're talking about!

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[nathanm]

Okay, now does anyone else agree with them? I'm fine with calling it that if there is consensus...

First, yes, he's right. Acronyms must be pronounceable. Each letter of an initialization is spoken.

Second, who cares if there's consensus or not? If what he wrote is correct, he's right. Consensus doesn't make something right or wrong, just accepted.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[nathanm]

Quite honestly, I've never heard somebody call "Housing and Urban Development" hud. HUD is Heads Up Display. Wouldn't you be confused if someone came up to you and said "Yeah, there's so much new HUD going on around here these days."

I think you only hear it in reference to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Likewise, "HUD" in that sense is really only used "inside the beltway" and by commentators on federal government stuff (yawn).

HUD (for Housing & Urban Development) is a very common acronym in real estate. Pick up any listing of homes for sale (especially in cities) and you'll find HUD used several times.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[coopex]

That should be: Command Line Infanty Team. I would know, I'm the commander.

Re:JFCCNW

[coopex]

The answer to that test is obvious. He will be facing forward, then two doors will open on his left and right. Out of his peripheral vision he notices the computer and the girl. Having not posted to slashdot in 23 minutes, and having not been with a girl ever, he thinks. Slashdot... only chance with a girl... slashdot... only chance with a girl... This quickly forces him into an status where he will move towards the computer, but then the force off the girl will keep him from getting to it, and vice versa. After a minute of this, the NSA officer gets bored, shoots him, and uses his secret mind control ray to get Bush to bomb another country.

Bush now has...

[SCVirus]

... the worlds biggest ddos kiddie group!

I'm going to be very unpopular (but...)

[gone.fishing]

I am a United States citizen. As a citizen of this country I enjoy several freedoms that I may occasionally take forgranted, and at other times I may even feel go too far. These freedoms are what I value most about my country and what I would like to export to the rest of the world. These freedoms include the Freedom of Speech, the Freedom of the Press, and Freedom of Religion.

It bothers me that our country would in any way shape or form interfere with these rights no matter where the people are from - regardless of the position their own country has on these issues our country should never - ever interfer with anything that approaches free expression of these values!

I know war is "different." That sometimes we need to interfere with the enemy's communication to their people in the field. That today this may mean that the military requires "hackers" to work the internet - or that the NSA may need to have supercomputers that "read" the traffic on the internet. But that does not give us carte blanch to hack or DOS websites that say even hateful things about the United States.

When we interfere with these things we are attacking the very things that we stand for. That is wrong.

I have a serious problem with orginizations like the KKK - but even they still have the right to express their views - even if it is venom! The same really has to go for Al-Queda if we are going to "practice what we preach."

I've served my country. I did so precisely because I believe in the freedoms that we have. In all honesty, I want the world to share these freedoms. If I didn't, I would have never served.

Say what you want, but we have to tread lightly when we interfere with freedom anywhere on the globe (and in cyberspace too). If we don't, we are not the people we think we are.

You mean initialism...

[zdv]

JFCCNW would technically be considered an initialism, not an acronym...

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[drinkypoo]

Yes, and when it comes to language, being accepted makes something right.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[nathanm]

Yes, and when it comes to language, being accepted makes something right.

On Slashdot? You're joking right?

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[drinkypoo]

I'm talking about rules of style, which have no place here on slashdot. Discussing them is, however, somewhat geeky when viewed from a certain point of view -- such as mine.

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[l0wland]

or the National Online Operations and Battle Services

Re:Worst. Acronym. Ever.

[FinalCut]

I am actually kind of suprised you haven't heard of HUD as "Housing and Urban Development"

While I have heard of HUD as heads up display - I'm pretty sure the Housing and Urban Development expansion of the acronym predates any existance of Heads Up Display.

It's always interesting to see how different backgrounds can effect the interpretation of language.