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Air Force Network Admins Found Out About Drone Virus Through News Story
Nemesisghost writes "Wired's Danger Room reports that the network admins of the 24th Air Force found out about the virus infecting the drone cockpits at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by reading the earlier news article. Quoting: 'Not only were officials in charge kept out of the loop about an infection in America’s weapon and surveillance system of choice, but the surprise surrounding that infection highlights a flaw in the way the U.S. military secures its information infrastructure: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of. The four branches of the U.S. armed forces each has a dedicated unit that, in theory, is supposed to handle cyber defense for the entire service. ... In practice, it’s not that simple. Unlike most big private enterprises, the 24th doesn’t have a centralized system for managing and monitoring its networks. There’s no place at the 24th’s San Antonio headquarters where someone could see all the digital traffic hurtling through the service’s pipes.'"
Compartmentalization AND Security through obscurity.
You can't make this stuff up.
When nuclear weapons were new, each branch of the military tried to become the 'nuclear' arm by introducing new weapons systems and trying to impress politicos with how they should be the ones with the budget and prestige. We don't need multiple branches of cybersecurity forces, we need one branch that can handle it all. Time to dump the military romanticism of the 18th century that divides our military into earth/water/air/fire/heart and reorg. Hell, maybe we even need another side to the Pentagon for cyberwarfare.
Ok, is this what they meant by downgraded provisional cyber command? As in, a room with pictures of maps on big flat screens and no actual command of anything? If this is the best the most elite hackers our military can muster, then I think my wife should try and apply. She knows how to use Excel pretty well.
No, because that is intentional.
If you encrypt it, you have to distribute the decryption keys. That's not a trivial task when you're talking about military situations. You have to deal with unreliable communications, the possibility of a unit being overrun and keys captured, and distributing new keys regularly over a very wide area to units from several countries. Now remember that any of these problems don't merely cause downtime, but get troops killed.
Or you just transmit the video unencrypted.
The assumption was any adversary sophisticated enough to receive the video would also have the minimal radar and signals capabilities to detect the presence of the drones anyway, so the video itself would not be all that helpful.
That assumption doesn't hold with the conflicts we are currently fighting, so they're trying to figure out if it's sufficiently worthwhile to encrypt the data with the problems that would cause.
What you've just suggested is the same error clueless bureaucrats make about technology, except in reverse; the other side of the same coin.
PHBs who have no idea how computers or networks work say to organize or administrate them in a way that makes sense for organizing tangible items with physical problems, but utterly fails when applied to computers.
You have suggested organizing the branches of the military according to the way a computer network should be organized. Worse, you've suggested this not only regarding the branches' computer networks, but also regarding military operations.
Not only do you ignore the inter-service cooperation that already exists, but you ignore the pointless extra division that your idea would entail, like having AF pilots flying aircraft off carriers or flying Blackhawks full of Army troops. In both cases, the AF pilots would be working exclusively with members of the other branch, so what would the point be of having them under a different CoC? They'd end up assigned to TDY under another branch...in which case they might as well be in that branch in the first place. It really doesn't help unit cohesion to have artificial divisions between, e.g. the chopper pilots and the troops they carry around and support.
Are you even aware that the Marines are under the Department of the Navy? Sheesh.
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