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Pentagon Cyber Defense Bill Comes To $100M For 6 Months
coondoggie writes "Protecting defense departments networks cost taxpayers more than $100 million over the past six months, US Strategic Command officials said yesterday.
The motives of those attacking the networks go from just plain vandalism to theft of money or information to espionage. Protecting the networks is a huge challenge for the command, Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton told a cyber security conference in Omaha, Neb., this week.
'Pay me now or pay me later,' Davis said. 'In the last six months, we spent more than $100 million reacting to things on our networks after the fact. It would be nice to spend that money proactively to put things in place so we'd be more active and proactive in posture rather than cleaning up after the fact.'"
The in short no. Chances are just about every lesson they learned is top secret. The fact attacks have been occurring at all was probably secret for some time
In principle, the notion of securing defence networks is pretty much unobjectionable. And, if you are going to do so, doing it right the first time, rather than playing cleanup, is obviously superior.
Network security is a pretty constantly evolving thing, and something done right the first time, can still be completley undone in a couple of years if maintenance and upgrades are not tightly followed. As security threats emerge, systems have to be able to adapt to new threats, and this can be pretty costly, even for the most well developed systems.
The biggest cost to them is probably policy enforcement, when you think about how many Users the DoD has, and how many different levels of security clearance has to be enforced and maintained, the checking, reporting and acting on identified risks and threats would use an incredibly large amount of resources.
Call me cynical, but at Pentagon Pricing(TM), that sounds like a bargain.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
It's certainly NOT Top Secret, in fact it's probably not classified. I would assume its FOUO, meaning that it can't be publicly released nor is it available through the FOIA.
Brett
That's roughly $6.34 each second.
If you tried to put together a single 9 man team consisting of the , it wouldn't be enough to pay them to finish the season.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Since when does everything a government does belong in the public domain? While the national security card is over played by most administrations (the previous one, in particular), it IS a valid reason to keep things secret.
If the NSA wanted to control cybersecurity, parading a 100 million USD expenditure over the past 6 months in front of people probably isn't going to do much of.. well.. anything.
How many trillions of dollars of expenditures are in or have been in the news in the past 6 months? 100 million is pocket change. Looks damnably reasonable, in comparison.
I don't expect morality, equality, consistency, or justice from the law. I expect only legality.
You should have been able to fix this yourself.
Don't allow slut mode for everything.
Figure out what sites they use for the training, and add them to the trusted sites list.
I've seen this before in various places, and always disregarded the instructions for setting it up, and figure out what sites to add, instead.
They end up a lot more secure when I've finished setting them up, than if the instructions were followed.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
I didn't have administrator access and wasn't employed to do IT, and thus couldn't have done a proper set up for everyone, anyway, so I took the easy way out - just setting slut mode to do training, then turning everything off when finished. As far as I am aware, everyone else in my office (and on that base, for all I knew) had slut mode set full time so they could do training when required,. As the training wasn't base-specific, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that the average Windows installation on non-sensitive systems USAF-wide is set with similar lax settings with the base firewalls being the main idea of security.
Hopefully, someone from the USAF will jump on and tell me that things have changed since then and/or that base must have been an exception.
You know...the greatest irony of this is that it was a REPUBLICAN that warned of this. Eisenhower had a great many things to say on the subject of the military industrial complex and war in general. Unfortunately everyone associates the latest string of Republican fuckups with all Republican behavior. I'm not a big fan of some of Eisenhower's religious bent, but as far as understanding the threat of the military industrial complex and his understanding of war I will forgive him. He has a really great speech warning about the threats of the military industrial complex and making war a profitable endeavor.
Some choice quotes...please take the time to compare to our latest Republican "leader"
Don't join the book burners. Do not think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed.
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
How far you can go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without?
I despise people who go to the gutter on either the right or the left and hurl rocks at those in the center.
I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.
I would rather try to persuade a man to go along, because once I have persuaded him, he will stick. If I scare him, he will stay just as long as he is scared, and then he is gone.
If men can develop weapons that are so terrifying as to make the thought of global war include almost a sentence for suicide, you would think that man's intelligence and his comprehension... would include also his ability to find a peaceful solution.
If the United Nations once admits that international disputes can be settled by using force, then we will have destroyed the foundation of the organization and our best hope of establishing a world order.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.
In most communities it is illegal to cry "fire" in a crowded assembly. Should it not be considered serious international misconduct to manufacture a general war scare in an effort to achieve local political aims?
In short...he is the antithesis to modern Republican behavior, an excellent leader, and a true soldier. He was also human and made mistakes...but FAR better than the "leaders" we have had over the last few decades.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Something tells me the nuke launch systems aren't on the same network as the rest of the DOD.
Seriously though -- save $100 million and run a separate network.
Do me a favor - go read up on military networks in Wikipedia. You can start with the 25-year old MILNET network.
You can also bet that there's networks that nobody in the public (or low-to-medium levels of military) knows.
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The idea that if I had the right combination of addresses and credentials I could launch a nuke right now is ludicrus.
You're right, it's ludicrous. That's why the idea is never pursued, except possibly for honeypots/misinformation.
Man, I just wasted 15 minutes trying to enlighten you!
You are just having a bad day.
Militia (National Guard) = Homeland defense, disaster recovery & relief, Search & Rescue.
Military = Protection of US interests abroad (Projection of Power, Police actions, and Trade Route Protection)
As an aside, the rise of Piracy in the South China Sea and Indian Oceans came about when the Soviet Union Collapsed (thus removing their ships from trade route protection) and the US Navy began downsizing in response (Remove a large portion of the US Navy from Trade Route Protection).
Piracy will always be a problem unless there is someone willing to expend the resources to protect the trade routes. In the 19th Century it was Britain, and in the 20th, it was the USA.
The irony is that idiots like you still label them 'republican' and 'democrat' as if that matters.
What team they play for doesn't change who the person is, our country will do a lot better when you idiots stop voting for your team and start voting for the guy that makes most sense for the job.