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Department of Homeland Security Wants Nerds For a New "Cyber Reserve'"

Posted by samzenpus on from the grabbing-geeks dept.

pigrabbitbear writes "Just three weeks after Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told an audience at the Sea, Air and Space Museum that the U.S. is on the brink of a 'cyber Pearl Harbor,' the government has decided it needs to beef up the ranks of its digital defenses. It's assembling a league of extraordinary computer geeks for what will be known as the 'Cyber Reserve.'"

8 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. You know I've been wondering about this.... by rsilvergun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    give the prevalence of H1B immigrants and the fact that most aren't staying in the country (better digs back home) does America have any hope of hanging onto a competitive edge? Not that it matters much for the guys at the top (they're global, they don't think about little stuff like countries anymore), but for little 'ole me stuck here in the good 'ole US of A it's a worry.

    And if you think I'm exaggerating, you either aren't working in tech or you're not paying attention.

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    1. Re:You know I've been wondering about this.... by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, I'm saying how are we suppose to build up any know how and skill in this country if all we do is ship in cheap labor and ship it out. For the record though I've got nothing against stealing the world's best and brightest. We did it in WWII with the Nazi's and it worked out great (rockets, atomic bomb, etc). OTOH, I do wish we'd stop shipping in entry level programming positions. You will never convince me there's a shortage of VB programmers :P.

      --
      Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
    2. Re:You know I've been wondering about this.... by node159 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There is hardly ever a shortage of skills at such a geographically large scale, rather there is a shortage of candidates willing to work at the offered rate. If there really was a true shortage, as will all supply and demand scenarios one would see a significant rise in pay rates across the sector, which as not happened.

      --
      GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
  2. Re:Please, just stop... by Penurious+Penguin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think they know this well enough, but their terminology is specifically targeted at the sort of people who consider the act of defacing a webpage serious hacking. What we really need is a GUI interface in Visual Basic to track the IPs of these terrible cyber-terrorists. That'd do it, mark my wurd.

    --
    Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
  3. Re:Please, just stop... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    But but but people connect their power plants and natural gas pumping stations to the internet because they wanted to post some updates on their facebook or do a foursquare checkin and they forgot their iPhone at home! Then when some work gets into these control systems and causes problems (maybe even people could die), it is not because of action of some locals that hooked up critical systems to the internet. It will be "digital perl harbor"!!

    In politics it is not about rationality and common sense. It is about posers and perceptions. Hell, that's how we almost all died back in the engineered "Cuban missile crises".

    So when some retards screw up a power grid, the result will be "how do we respond?!? war! WAR!", not "why were these systems on unprotected networks?".

    Times change, but our thought patterns seem to clearly remain back in the stone age. DHS just proves the point once again.

  4. More like dividing and conquering by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Look she spouted a lot of garbage about 'cyber-geddon' and it was torn apart by geeks pointing out that hacking a web page of a power station with its 10 visitors a day, is not synonymous with attacking the power station, and that the fix for these problems is to keep critical stuff on private network links.

    So they hire a few geeks who will talk sh1t to attack the real enemy, us and our plain talking common sense! The War on Common Sense!

    I noticed that the Russian Hacker, Georgia revealed a few days ago, was a sad man living in a crappy room, not a soldier in a military uniform surround by War Game screens. They are just a pest, and for Georgia it should have patched its servers and locked down its logins, even for the government websites so he couldn't deface them.

    If you have a problem, you fix the problem, you don't declare war on it.

  5. Re:NO! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It shows you have better taste than all them kids theses days, with their colorful bovine

  6. Every time I read or hear "Homeland" I think by 3seas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hitler and the motherland....