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NSA Wages Cyberwar Against US Armed Forces Teams
Hugh Pickens writes "A team of Army cadets spent four days at West Point last week struggling around the clock to keep a computer network operating while hackers from the National Security Agency tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The NSA made the cadets' task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world. The competition was a final exam for computer science and information technology majors, who competed against teams from the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine as well as the Naval Postgraduate Academy and the Air Force Institute of Technology. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools' networks while also defending their own but only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, and special authorizations is allowed to take down a US network. NSA tailored its attacks to be just 'a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could distinguish the strongest teams from the weaker ones.' The winning West Point team used Linux, instead of relying on proprietary products from big-name companies like Microsoft or Sun Microsystems."
I participated in this as a Cadet in 2001. We used a variety of operating systems, including Windows 2000, Solaris, Linux, and Mac OS9. Even back then, the Linux server and desktop client had by far the greatest uptime. Well, except for me, as I was attempting to rebuild the Windows server after they had taken it down, yet again.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
Although you jest, I'm actually surprised at how confident and competent the NSA seem here. Maybe it's just an (unfair?) association I've built up that government organisation = technically incompetent, and I know they employ a lot of very smart people, but it surprises me that they were so far ahead of the teams that they could pick exactly what level of difficulty to set their attacks at.
Seeing at some of the work that's presented at conventions, the brilliantly paranoid security systems that the likes of OpenBSD have, and some of the distinctly embarrassing news stories about the latest government network being hacked by some guy in a basement, I guess I was just expecting the NSA to get more of a run for their money than "Yeah, we pitched it so they couldn't quite win. No problem really."
I'd be interested to see how a team harvested from the basements of MIT or Caltech would stack up in a challenge like this, actually.