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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."
From the article:
"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.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
an army of one's and zero's
_+_+__+_+_+_+_+_+_+++
when i moo u moo - just like that
I wonder if there will be restrictions on security patches during war-time?
"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!
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
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.
Iran captures three CIA agents
science fiction slowly becomes reality.
the article refers to the JFCCNW as being the "... most formibidable hacker posse. Ever."
... so maybe the editors need to take anothNO CARRIER
looks like www.jfccnw.mil is offline
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Dear Habib,
My name is Akmar and I have just inherited $3 million, but it is stuck in a US bank account....
hack a day
Don't tell me - they are going to remotely deploy WinXP Service Pack 2 on the enemy's network?
Masterful...
b3 4ll j00 c4N B3!
J01n t3h 4RmY! T1s 133t!
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
How about Worldwide Online Operations Team ?
...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
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
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?
Freedom's Special Computer Knights
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
Couldn't we just /. them into submission?
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.
You're looking for quotes? See my journal.
Command Line Soldiers!
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.
.mil computers to DDoS offending servers of phisher, spammers, etc.
Perhaps the day will come when the government deploys
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
is a good offense. Also, if you know how to attack, you also know how to defend.
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Homeland Agency for the eXecution and eXtermination of Our Rivals?
Thinkin' Lincoln - a web comic of presidential proportions
And everyone keeps complaining about chinese or russian militaries using hackers.
Geeks in uniforms. Isn't best Buy already trying this?
People of America's New [Internet|Information|Intelligence] Commandos
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
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."
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.
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?
The rock, the vulture, and the chain
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.
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
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.
Massive Soldier Force of Technology - MSFT.
"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
Freedom's Special Computer Knights
They're French?? I thought they were American!
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.
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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.
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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?
... 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).
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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/
Top 10 Reasons To Procrastinate
10.
Whats wrong with People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms? Is it that hard?
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
"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.
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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."
How about Forcefully Undulating Computer Killers with Totally Awesome Reconnaisance Devices in Zimbabwe?
The best part is they hired Hugo Weaving to head it up...
Sadly, the best geeks will never make it to this group because of the pushup requirements.
http://xs4.xs.to/pics/04481/p556222.gif
have been known for calling them Worldwide Technical Fighters...
WTF?.. WTF?...
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
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?
The only thing the enemy would need to employ to completely overwhelm and undermine this army of nerds would be..... a female.
Curiosity was framed. Ignorance killed the cat.
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.'
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
The Perl code in [Gob Blesh It]'s sig is a recursive delete.
Mod him down. Script Kiddie deserves no Karma.
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.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
"Electronic Defenders" ?? from who ?? more like "Electronic Attackers" bud.
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...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
with carrots, flies, and ink-eradicators, of course.
copyright © 2005 Flamsmsmark the ravings of a melancholly i
I am sure that it has already been registered with the Federal Acronym Registration Team
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
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)
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.
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento
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.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
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
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.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
you missed...
National Electronic Research and Defense Service
According to the Chicago Manual of Style's FAQ, it's an initialism:
Morality is usually taught by the immoral.
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.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.