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Meet the Military's Cyber-Security Forces
destinyland writes "How exactly would the military fight a cyber war? In August 2009, the U.S. Air Force activated its new cyberspace combat unit, the 24th Air Force, to 'provide combat-ready forces trained and equipped to conduct sustained cyber operations.' It's commanded by former Minuteman missile and satellite-jamming specialist Major General Richard Webber. (And under his command are two wings, the 688th Information Operations Wing and the 67th Network Warfare Wing, plus a combat communications units.) Meanwhile, to counter the threat of cyber warfare, DARPA is still deploying the National Cyber Range, a test bed of networked computers to test countermeasures against 'cyberwar.' (According to one report, it provides 'a virtual network world — to be populated by mirror computers and inhabited by myriad software sim-people "replicants," and used as a firing range in which to develop the art of cyber warfare.') The Obama administration has even added a military cybersecurity coordinator to the National Security team."
That word bugs the hell out of me. It's like watching a "hacker" in the movies waving around a power glove while a graphic of a virus attacks things. And you used it 9 times in that summary. Just stop it.
How exactly would the military fight a cyber war?
Post a carefully worded call to arms on 4chan.
Link that is not down.
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
So are they now going to propose a Homeland Defense Firewall, to protect and defend american business and citizens against foreign cyber attacks? Or will they be "simply monitoring" the routers coming in and out of the country? I wouldn't be surprised. Of course, no privacy invasions, no espionage will occur over the monitoring channels. Only criminal and terrorist investigation. And even then, only with a warrant. Of course we can be assured of that. Of course you can trust the military to always defend Americans and respect American law and use of decency. Of course. We all agree on that.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Any comments in this story will be monitored by the 24th Air Force for suspicious activity. Suspicious activity includes disclosing the activities of ... ow! hey! don't taze me ... NO CARRIER
I am officially gone from
*jumps into flame suit *
Or would that now be called the Chairforce?
Life is not for the lazy.
to be populated by mirror computers and inhabited by myriad software sim-people 'replicants,' and used as a firing range in which to develop the art of cyber warfare.")
Oh, yeah, I remember these guys. We invited the general to come and post on slashdot a few years back. They never did come up with a good answer to how they can recruit the necessary talent when the aforementioned is generally anti-authoritarian. Hacking, or "cyberwarfare", or whatever you want to call it, all requires a high degree of creativity combined with the ability to see patterns in seemingly random information. Both of these skillsets are a rarity in the general population -- most people are linear sequential thinkers, which means they can't start one task without stopping another. Everything about this theatre is contrary to conventional military discipline.
This is an organization that still believes that only men should be in their little club, gays are bad, and if you're over 30 you're too old. Maybe that works well when you're comparing gun sizes, but in this theatre the groups they're excluding have exactly the human resources such an operation needs: Women are generally able to multitask and see the "big picture" easier than men, gays stereotypically gravitate towards creative endeavors (theatre, graphic design, etc.), and the over 30 crowd has exactly the kind of in-depth understanding of the technology and experience necessary to use it that a bunch of twenty-somethings just can't match, no matter how good the training.
They're putting themselves at a huge handicap -- and they can't afford to do that. Especially when China has more honor students than we have students in whole. They can afford to be prejudiced. They can afford to throw a million people over a cliff to fund public works projects. Meanwhile, our antiquidated notions of what a soldier is puts us at a substantial risk of being obliterated in the global theatre.
Sad. Where's an angry four star general when you need one?
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Tenth Fleet will be reactivated in October 2009 as the U.S. Navy's Fleet Cyber Command/10th Fleet.[2] The command will be the Naval component of United States Cyber Command. Its first commander will be VADM Bernard J. McCullough III. [3]
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Tenth_Fleet#Fleet_Cyber_Command
Most people in the military are severely lacking in kind of skills needed to protect America's electronic infrastructure. It has to do with military culture more than anything else. Techies just don't get promoted the way fighter pilots do. I would shut the whole thing down and start a new branch or something. Otherwise, it's a giant waste of money.
Actually, I wouldn't expect that from them at all. The military has no real interest in spying on the civilian population. Perhaps the FBI, CIA, or NSA might do the stuff you were spouting off about, but the military is going to be focused on conducting electronic and cyber warfare, i.e. destroying the enemy's electronic infrastructure and protecting our military's infrastructure.
if you want to be hysterically paranoid, at least do it about the right things...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
In cyberspace, traditional "army" concepts have no meaning, specially the partt when we talk about huge number of active/willing participants. The only thing that could have army-like numbers are zombie PCs, something that "should" not be used (your country hacking your pc to attack what they consider enemies? and leaving the door open so potentially youir enemy could use your pc too?. They should behave as firefighters (taking measures/educating to limit a lot the odds that someone gets zombified) or terrorists/commandos (skilled individuals could make big differences).
In fact, the weapons in cyberwar only have meaning because no or weak defenses. And a good attack would be improving those "defenses", both at consumer level (they should punish or do official statements about recommending NOT using vulnerable software, as i.e. did several countries last weeks about IE, promote secure practices and alternative software and platforms, etc) as an enterprise level (from security scanning/assessment of critical and general places). And that is no work of military but of government.
Does this mean the president will have his thumb on a little red button to release the HaCKERZ now?
There is a threat to our knowledge, our words, our very sense of self. It permeates the ether, watching, waiting for us to lower our guard. Although we sit on the brink of moral decay, staring back from the abyss towards an enemy unseen, we shall not falter in our duty. We must stand firm against these intruders. Our very credit scores are at stake. And I tell you this: wherever they are, they will be met with strength. We shall fight them on the wireless. We shall fight them at the backbone. We shall never surrender. And though these days may be marked as the darkest days in the history of the MacOS, it is history that will one day show that we did not give ground where it was not taken. G-Force!
Instead of spending yet another astronomical amount of resources to try to patch up our "defenses", why not fund a few open source projects to get a some implementations of the Capability Security Model out into circulation?
A few well placed millions (or heck, even thousands) could fix the internet for good, and then we could all get on with general purpose computing, without the need for virus scanners, etc.
Maybe this will be the kicker needed to get businesses and such to really use encryption in their Internet traffic.
Actually, I wouldn't expect that from them at all. The military has no real interest in spying on the civilian population. Perhaps the FBI, CIA, or NSA might do the stuff you were spouting off about, but the military is going to be focused on conducting electronic and cyber warfare, i.e. destroying the enemy's electronic infrastructure and protecting our military's infrastructure.
if you want to be hysterically paranoid, at least do it about the right things...
You're calling someone paranoid by because they aren't correctly identifying which part of the government is spying on them illegally? That's a new one.
However, you'd be wrong anyway.
In late 2008 the U.S Army Reserve spied on peaceful protests against the Federal Reserve.
http://www.infowars.com/images/reserve1.jpg
http://www.infowars.com/images/reserve2.jpg
http://www.infowars.com/images/reserve3.jpg
In 2005, NBC obtained a secret 400-page Defense Department document listing more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country related to peaceful anti-war demonstrations. “The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups,” NBC reported.
In the wake of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon established the Counterintelligence Field Activity. CIFA illegally conducted broad domestic operations that targeted antiwar and other dissident domestic groups and logged these in the TALON database. After the unit received negative publicity, the Pentagon’s senior intelligence official, James R. Clapper, recommended to Sec. Def. Gates that the counterintelligence field office be dismantled and that some of its operations be placed under the authority of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Please be more informed before you speak. Thanks.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
echo mirage?
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I don't understand why they don't properly organize a cyber-militia. Russia and China sure seem to have their own going.
We could pounce them 5 to 1 with all the private computer networks and crackers around the World that might contribute. They just need a proper command and control system, otherwise I could totally see more than a few friendly fire incidents ( "sorry about that L.A., I thought I was pulling the plug on the power grid in Bejing").
Living in Chile
Few women, no gays, age limit. Then, too, there's the religious intolerance that has been reported at the Air Force Academy. (Google it, there are a lot of articles, most when it was first reported in 2005, but also since then.) I wonder what percentage of people with the talents needed to be "cyberwarriors" are evangelical Christians?
US is going to open a can of whoop-ass with its own Kuang Grade Mark Eleven icebreaker!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
This summary read like the back cover of a sequel to Neuromancer.
That lots of the people who would make up your cyber militia would be the type who are inherently anti-authoritarian and distrustful of organizations of any sort - and thus would be self-excluded.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
If economic strength, drives political strength and international standing (hopefully no one has any illusions that it doesn't do both). And USA's economic strength is currently predicated on intellectual property (which can then manufactured somewhere else) then how do we (as a nation...or any nation) protect ourselves from the array of network attacks that are launched against us? I think some sort of national firewall or cooperative agreement is a good idea to help protect against those countries that steal our strength. Maybe this can be optional/opt-in by company, but the high-costs and large holes of network defense right now are letting 100's of billions of $ fly out of the country every year. There may eventually be a separate secure network and the wild-wild west internet we know today.
What a gas!! Loved all those green thingy lines -- really gucci, doods and doodettes!
Geez, and those guys -- those were the same buckaroos at the 1999 Silicon Valley conference where they made that fantasy proclamation about something called "The New Economy" (where they hell did they hide that thing, anyway????). That's where no money had to be spent on any hardware or install testing, all the software was downloaded from the 'net (I believe that's what they called those interpipe thingies).
Oh yeah...I take this very seriously guys.
Especially because, wooooo, looky there, there's my fav braless newsy, Leslie Stahl, go baby go!!!!
Geez Louise! I haven't seen here on the TV since I gave up watching that 60 Minutes show when she gushed over that Taliban jet pilot, who lived in the US but occasionally went back to Afghanistan to bomb the hell out of those innocent civilians who refused to join the Taliban. (Now those are the bad guys? Am I right here -- or still confused????)
Keep on gushing, braless Leslie....
FROM EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN!
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
....like the way Wall Street and the Republicrats fight the Class War, only better????
Is there a prize if I got the right answer?????
I never said it would be good militia. Then also we kind of got the U.S. because a bunch of "inherently anti-authoritarian and distrustful of organizations of any sort" types.
Perhaps a better way would be to treat them like privateers. The U.S. government can just put out bounties on targets, and watch the hackers take them down.
Living in Chile
Hmmm...maybe we'll have to bring back Harrison Ford to "retire" all of these replicants;
So, really, how many of us came here hoping, at least for a second, that it would be called Public Security Section 9?
It's OK, don't be ashamed. You're among friends.
Get a sustainable economic model and stop relying on a product that needs artificial scarcity (which is easily overcome) to be created.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
which sounds like someone who starred in a '70s era pornographic movie
but the truth is that the world's first computer programmer was a woman. and if you look at her method for writing a computer program, it's really more like an extended effort at a clever hard hack. in which case, you're talking about the world's first hacker too
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it