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CIA's Info Ops Team Hosts 3-Day Cyber Wargame
ScentCone writes "The CIA has booked some conference rooms and is working through a simulated 'digital Pearl Harbor' to see how government and industry handle a monster net attack from an imaginary future foe composed of anti-American and anti-globalization hackers. Having been accused of lacking imagination about potential terror attacks, they're using the exercise to better shape the government's roles in a variety of attack scenarios. The networking industry, it seems, is expected to always play a big part in detecting and thwarting such threats, as 9/11-scale economic disruption is a likely bad-guy objective."
The network attacks YOU!
But personally, I'm waiting for "Digital Hiroshima"
People compare September 11 with a lot of things, but comparing it with a crack-fest? I doubt that it's even *possible* to kill several thousand people with cracking, you could only cause extreme inconvenience.
Besides, security can be achieved through a couple of simple steps: Don't use Windows, use OS's designed with security in mind. Use SELinux or equivalent on mission critical nodes. And secondly, educate the users and gain a culture of safety.
For all the hoopla about the pervasiveness of the internet in our daily lives, when it comes down to brass tacks, it's all just electronic pulses. When those pulses go dark, the wires are still around routing telephone calls. No one dies in a burning, collapsing building. No one dies in a hijacked airplane. No one dies because they stand too close to a bomb. Those bits just go dark and the internet disappears for a while.
A day without the internet is like a sky without vaportrails.
Even the data that is destroyed by such an attack is not at such a disadvantage. Though the paper-less office has been a longstanding goal, it is totally a dream. Everything has a papertrail and can be backed up.
There is no calamity awaiting us in the event of a terrorist cyberattack. The real calamity is the usurpation of rights due to terrorist attack fearmongering.
Sadly my website http://www.rogertheshrubber.net/ has already fallen victim to the hordes of the digital pearl harbour. There is a pestilence upon this land. Nothing is sacred. Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
It's wonderful that the CIA has such trustworthy people that wouldn't think of disclosing details of such a secure operation..... Oh, wait.
I'm not sure whether this is completely appropriate to include in a press release.
Insofar as the intelligence community is coming up with possible scenarios, yes, I think this is a possible scenario. And worth looking into.
Insofar as the government- MY government- is identifying and singling-out anti-globalization folks as "The Enemy" and "anti-American," I'm a bit frustrated. I'm an American who is also somewhat anti-globalization*.
So, thumbs up for doing some preparation that might actually matter. Thumbs down, however, for singling out anti-globalization as "The Enemy" and "anti-American."
You're the government. You have a responsibility to your citizens to not insult moderate views commonly held by U.S. citizens, however accidentally you do so. If you're going to put out press releases, hire some rhetoric Ph.Ds or something.
*There a lot of ins-and-outs to globalization. I'm against greedy globalization, which so far has unfortunately been rampant.
Has any progress been made in the last few years on improving the state of government computer security?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Hey, if you were on the committee deciding how to spend the new money you got on the defence budget, wouldn't you want to spend it on some fun war-style games? That way, you can pretend there's a disaster and save the world without the whole mess of killing lots of Americans. Much more fun. I bet you that more money is spent on the lunches of the people involved in this than money spent on ACTUAL foriegn aid (not money called foreign aid sent to the pockets of other politicians, real foreign aid). And I'm not joking.
Why not just call the event "Perl Harbor," I think everyone would get the reference.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The less one knows about computers and networks, the more one can believe any "digital Pearl Harbour" scenarios.
E.g., I still fondly remember when I was 18, and mind you I was programming assembly for some years already, I thought I could write _the_ virus that would bring the whole economy to its knees. (Which is why I didn't actually release it.) Looking back in retrospect, omg, that idea was soo retarded.
Now throw in politicians, who have about as much clue of computers as your cat has _and_ make a living by blowing things out of proportion to an audience who knows even less. Right. You can see where that is going.
In practice, our computers aren't that vulnerable, ironically, because we know they're a fragile contraption. They don't exist in a vaccuum, as some box in a corner that noone knows about. Any company has a small army of admins who can deal with threats, has backups, etc.
Even things like Blaster didn't really do that much harm. The network congestion died pretty quickly, as everyone scrambled to block ports and disinfect machines. At the corporation I work for, it cost a total of a couple of days of the IT staff's work, to deal with some tens of infected computers out of many thousands. And that was the only virus I know of that made it inside in the last half a decade. (Unlike what Linux zealots like to claim about Windows securitiy, IRL it doesn't really cost _that_ much to keep it running.)
Or I remember one bank bitching about their DB/2 corruption, but even that didn't shut them down. Even doing the irresponsible thing and keeping running with a corrupt database and repairing it on the fly, in the end worked. It cost them some millions per day, yes, but the bank continued to work.
Just about the only thing one can't really defend against is a DDOS attack. No matter how well patched and firewalled a network is, when you have 10 GB/s stuffing your inbound pipe, you're stuffed.
But here's the fun part about those: they work against one site at a time. Directing some tens of thousands of zombies to spew 10 GB/s at one site, yeah, stuffs it. Directing the same 10 GB/s at 10,000 sites, won't even start to matter. There is no way that can be a threat to the whole economy or anything.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Defending yourself against the United States makes you a "bad guy?"
From the perspective of a citizen of the United States, yes.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
To some people money doesn't matter. Time and time again the military and intelligence communities attract hugely talented individuals because of the work environment. Dave Grossman talked about this in his book On Killing. There is a small minority of people who are talented warlike mischeif makers who given the right environment, ethical and monetary backing can go a long way to louse up the enemies day. Bruce Schneier says the same thing in Secrets and Lies. Examples of this in history are myriad. Google topics like the Tunnel Rats in vietnam. The bad guy mentality in the right environment attracts these guys.
You don't have to have to be a "bad guy" but being/thinking so is what separates the best intelligence and military personnel from the average. Obviously, you still need a 'good' value system but the 'bad guy' psyche still is needed.
It's even written in the vast majority of intelligence literature out there that the best overall intelligence guys are borderline 'bad guys'. Examples are myriad:
The original detective Eugène François Vidocq was the founding father of criminal investigation. He was a notorious bad guy whose innovations bolstered police intelligence gathering.
Michael Levine who was one of the top undercover agents ever assigned to the Drug Enforcement Agency said in an interview that "The secret to my success was ..... A police lieutenant, with whom I worked many years later, looked at me, after I had done, in one day, something like four or five undercover buys from different groups -- from Hispanics, from Blacks, from Whites -- and he was covering me along with my group. He said: "You know what the thing is about you, Levine? You're a guy who should've gone bad. You should have been a gangster. You should have been in jail. But somehow you turned out right. And that's why you're so ..." [convincing]. And I thought about it, and I thought about my youth and about the way I grew up, and I realized that there was a lot of truth in what he said. I was FROM the streets. The streets were in me. There was a thin line between me and the guys who I was working against. And that line was so thin that drug dealers couldn't see it. Do you understand? The line that separated them from me as a suspected agent was so thin that drug dealers could NEVER believe that I was an agent. And that's an attitude .... that's something you can't teach."
The CIA Case officer Gust Avrakotos who ran the covert operation arming the Mujahideen by proxy through Pakistan in the 1980's Afgan-Russian war was nicknamed 'Dr Dirty' by his CIA peers because he was such an aggressive rule-breaking intelligence operative who had an inherent 'bad guy' view of intelligence operations which helped him numerous times in executing deals inside and outside the CIA.
Ex US Army intelligence analyst Ralph Peters Essay "The Black Art of Intelligence" speaks that the best intelligence analysts have a specific talent for the job and that talent is an underlying understanding of the dark side of humanity and this talent is born not made.
I could go on and on. Of course, you don't have to be a bad guy or empathise to be good at the job. In fact having an organisation filled with these guys would be counter-productive. But, like I stated, what separates the good from the brilliant is this 'bad guy' mentality.
"The best soldiers have a seasoning of devilry." General A.P. Wavell
Nah, we don't kill people. We play video games.
Sometimes I think the Army and government recruits like a gang or drug dealer. They offer people with little hope in life a job. They offer training. Stop me if you have heard this one: "The Navy will train you how to work on nuclear submaries... do you know how much people who work on nuclear stuff make outside the navy? $100,000 cash. Cold cash. Come on, let me hook you up, we'll even give you $5,000 if you sign up. It is a cakewalk, in 4 years you'll be out, and while you are in, we'll show you exotic places, exotic pussy. What do you want to do? Work in a McDonalds the next 4 years trying to save money for college? Hell, you can't even read".
Then the real story starts after boot camp. "You want me to do what? Tie a rope around my waist and drop down off the side of the battleship and clean the salt off the boat??" then in 4 years "My time is finally up. WHAT??? I got extended. By who?". And then the worst trick of all, 5 years later. "But I have nuclear experience, why can't I work for Ford? What, you exported all your jobs? Where??"
They have to get people in one way or another. Army and government recruitment is like spam for making your penis bigger. They will rip off anyone they can. It is ashame we let them in highschools to sell their programs to kids under 18, to prep them for when they turn 18. Kids should need to have their parents sign an approval form for their kids in highschool to watch the recruitments.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
It is an all-too-common misconception that disagreeing with a nation's administration renders one "unpatriotic." As far as I know, the definition of a patriot remains "one who loves and defends his or her country."
What many these days seem to fail to realize is that one's country and one's government are too very different things. If that were not the case, those fighting for America's freedom from British rule during the American Revolution, the quintessential example of an American patriot, would not be considered patriotic at all.
I'd like to remind everyone that the kid wearing the "Fuck Bush" t-shirt is still very much a patriot, so long as he loves his country for blessing him with the freedom to express his beliefs that contradict the administration's policy.
(And yes, I do realize that anyone kid wearing said t-shirt is, in all likelihood, doing so for attention rather than to further a political opinion.)
-- arstchnca
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There used to be a time when you could comment on such articles without it being turned into a political diatribe. This article is damn interesting and there could be some awesome commentary by some /.'ers. However you political numbnuts decided to turn this into soapbox rant afternoon.
/. groupthink. Leave your political rants for the /. political threads.
/. atmosphere.
BTW, I am left-leaning as well, but for fucks sake keep your politics to yourself. It's completely off-topic yet gets modded up becuase of
Cmon guys don't drag this place down a notch. It's annoying to sort through at +4/5 expecting cool comments but all you get is some guys off topic political rant that fits the
They suffer from imagination deficiency. Apart from disrupting things like pipelines, which (as I discovered when working for a company that made pipeline parts, among other things) have some interesting design deficiencies, there is the potential to do things like change the schedule of estuarine sewage pumps so that they pump out on the rising, not the falling tide. Or change the dosing pump settings on water treatment plants. Most of the world is incredibly dependent on clean water and sewage treatment, with river pollution so high as to make untreated water undrinkable. Serious disruption to the water system would kill or make sick a lot of old people and young children - and, just like US and Russian landmines that are designed to injure children rather than kill them, this would have disruptive effects out of proportion to the numbers and economic activity of those affected.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.