Slashdot Mirror
Air Force To Rewrite the Rules of the Internet
meridiangod writes "The Air Force is fed up with a seemingly endless barrage of attacks on its computer networks from stealthy adversaries whose motives and even locations are unclear. So now the service is looking to restore its advantage on the virtual battlefield by doing nothing less than the rewriting the 'laws of cyberspace.'" I'm sure that'll work out really well for them.
If they were smart, they would disconnect their computers from the public internet. People can't access hardware they can't access.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
actually there is a very simple measure ISPs can take to prevent many attacks.
and that is to prevent their customers from spoofing the source IP in their IP packets.
If governments (starting with the US) would pressure(force by law) ISPs to do this, it can be done with out much technological difficulties.
This anti-spoofing measure can be implemented on many levels, so that even if a certain ISP does not co-operate other ISPs could prevent its customers from spoofing any IP which does not belong to the problematic ISP. This in itself helps protect against IP spoofing.
Without IP spoofing attackers are more easily identified and blocked.
VPN?
How bout a private network.
Which is what all secret and above classifications use.
Physically disconnected from the internet.
Physically inaccessible by the plebes.
Code auditing, memory wiping, classification-based job scheduling (a machine works only on secret defense or only on top secret or only on top secret nuclear, or etc. jobs at a time, never mixing), secure attention keys, custom hardware, physical security, surveillance, custom hardware, etc.
I'd say that, for the shit that matters, they've got a pretty good setup. But let's listen to the internet nerds who think they know everything. They'll tell us how to fix it.
The Air Force excels at just about everything they do. But for the past decade or two, their Achilles Heel has been computing technology because it moves faster than anything else they're used to.
The Air Force is a very old organization and although they can generally respond to most anything quickly, overall change tends to happen very very slowly. Not long after I enlisted in 1998, there were rumors that the uniform was going to change from the classic camouflage pattern to a kind of pixellated-marble look. Based on what recent photos I can find, they're still only about halfway through getting the new uniform out to everyone.
Also, I know for a fact we're still flying some planes with vacuum tubes in the autopilot computer even though upgrades for all airframes have been around since at least the 80's. Most of the technical manuals that I used to repair avionics were between 25-40 years old and still had technical errors in them. (We weren't able to make corrections to technical manuals any more than you'd be allowed to make pen-and-ink corrections to a federal law.)
Computer use only became common in most squadrons about 10 years ago and even then, they were not really used for the correct purposes. Some captain would get the bright idea that somebody should use a spreadsheet program instead of a paper form for some menial task, force everybody to use it, ignore the pleas from his subordinates that it tripled the effort required to perform the task, and then make up some elaborate report for his commander about how he just saved the Air Force $358,000.
While I was in the service, the Air Force never really caught on that you had to hire and train smart people who know about computers if you wanted to make the most of them. Some squadrons took young administrative airman fresh out of tech school and sat them down in front of the admin console and said, "All right, it's your job now to make sure this doesn't break." This is very uncharacteristic of the Air Force as you normally need at least several weeks of training before you can be trusted to mop the floor correctly. But when a commander has something that needs to be done and he doesn't know how to do it, it's not at all uncommon for him to assign someone to it while implying that they should be rather quiet about it.
Others units farmed out network administration to government contractors like Lockheed Martin which wasn't any better because most of their employees are old military retirees who thought they were going to get paid more as a civilian for doing the same thing they did in the military and ended up being wrong on both counts. (Got seven stripes and an MSCE? Then they're hiring!)
I guess this long-winded point it that it doesn't surprise me that high-level Air Force officers are saying, "Hey, who says we can't control this thing? We're the Air Force, after all." They're used to having fine-grained control over everything in their view and a high degree of security surrounding it.
In other words, the Air Force is still nowhere near where they need to be in terms of network security. The only encouraging part of this is that they finally realize it.
Right. And some harsh realities have to be realized by the AF or any DOD department.
1) The Internet does not belong to America. Period. It is a global network of good guys and bad guys, and the rest of the world won't, nor should they abide by our rules.
2) The Internet does not belong to the military. It has far more to do with domestic and international trade and information than it does to various arms of the DOD.
If the USAF wants a secure network, then they should create their own isolated network completely divorced from the civilian Internet. I'm sorry if that means generals can't look at porn sites from their office, but that's the way things go.
The Internet is generally stupid