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

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.'"

Comments

NO!

[ganjadude]

you cannot commandeer /.!

Re:NO!

[ColdWetDog]

Maybe not but if they handed out T-shirts, geeks would be all over it.

Cyber Reserve?

[chill]

You know they are jealous of Best Buy and wanted to call this the Geek Squad.

Re:Cyber Reserve?

[siddesu]

You may laugh, but I already applied. Try to beat the photo on my resume. http://www.chaosscenario.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/06/27/internet.jpg

Re:Cyber Reserve?

[Warhawke]

I figured Cyber Men would be a better name for an extended army of...

Oh.

Re:Cyber Reserve?

[tehcyder]

Cyber!

a/s/l?

You know I've been wondering about this....

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:You know I've been wondering about this....

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:You know I've been wondering about this....

[node159]

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.

Assembling?

[The Grim Reefer]

Or rounding up?

[puts on tinfoil hat]

Re:Assembling?

[reboot246]

Many would say that working for DHS would be working for the enemy. They are quite good at terrorizing U.S. citizens.

If it worked like the Army reserve, I'd be in.

[jerpyro]

Think about it, you participate one weekend a month for sec training and preparedness drills, and take on a special project every once in a while, and get the military benefits without leaving your house. I'd be in for that, especially if it (being those projects) could be done as moonlighting outside my regular job. That doesn't sound so bad.

Re:If it worked like the Army reserve, I'd be in.

[girlinatrainingbra]

re: If it worked like the Army reserve, I'd be in. Think about it, you participate one weekend a month for ,,,

.

You do know that :

-- quite a few of the reserves are actually deployed at the present;

--a lot of the National Guard is called out and deployed at the present;

-- a lot of people who have finished their tours are told that they must re-up.

.

Even if they are not deployed overseas, they are often activated to take the place on base of combat troops who are deployed overseas. So if you're part of the Ready Reserve, be ready to be deployed at any time of need. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Just know about that ahead of time.

Re:If it worked like the Army reserve, I'd be in.

[stephanruby]

I'd be in for that, especially if it (being those projects) could be done as moonlighting outside my regular job. That doesn't sound so bad.

If they actually pay you for it, I doubt they'd let you do it at home.

Think about it, you participate one weekend a month for sec training and preparedness drills, and take on a special project every once in a while, and get the military benefits without leaving your house.

The US military is famous for switching job descriptions once people have entered their ranks.

Many people want to be Air Force pilots for instance, so they sign up with the Air Force, but when they find that it's really too competitive to be a pilot, or they don't have the political connections to make that happen. It's too late already -- they've signed on the doted line. The same goes for State Military Reserves, most thought they were committing themselves for a limited time duration of possibly doing disaster relief work, or at most that they might fight within the US in case it ever got attacked, not they were going to fight in Iraq in a pre-emptive war, and nor did they know that their contracts could be changed indefinitely at will.

Re:If it worked like the Army reserve, I'd be in.

[stephanruby]

That's not switching the job description, I'm pretty sure you sign up to be in the Air Force, I'm pretty sure they won't promise you'll be a pilot or a sniper before you sign up (maybe that it's a possibility).

Fine, disregard my Air Force example, but what about my Reservists example?

That's like signing up to work at best buy and then saying they duped you when you don't become manager.

This is true enough, may be not about Best Buy, I don't actually know that many people who dream of becoming Best Buy managers, but this does happen in other professions. For instance, in law firms, the carrot of becoming a partner usually gets bandied about for seven years, even if they know from the start that you'll never make the cut.

And this is different from the military, because the military is not some law firm you can join one day, and then quit the next as their lies get revealed to you. If you ever join the Reserves, they'll own you from that point forward. It doesn't matter if you fulfilled your contract, and retired from the military. Current events have shown that it's far more palatable to the American public to back-draft reservists into the military than to enact a mandatory draft, or to pay them actual wages super high enough that would make them want to actually go back.

Also, changing job description is not the only lie recruiters will tell you. See article below.

[...]

Last year, ABC News armed a group of high school students with hidden cameras and sent them into ten Army recruiting stations in in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, posing as potential applicants. Sadly, the Army failed this particular recruiting ethics test. More than half of the recruiters were caught on tape making what can only be kindly referred to as "misleading" statements. In other words, they lied.

One recruiter was filmed telling the applicant that his chances of being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan after basic training and job school were"slim to none." One recruiter bluntly stated that the Army wasn't sending people to Iraq anymore -- in fact, they were bringing them home. One simply said, "War? What war? The war ended years ago."

Another recruit was told he could quit the Army anytime he wanted to, just by asking, under a "failure to adapt" discharge. (Hee, hee.....Go ahead. Tell your drill sergeant you want to quit. But, make sure you tell me in advance. I want to sell tickets.)

[...]

Top Ten Lies Told by Recruiters

Please, just stop...

[FSWKU]

Once again, the clueless people in high places prove they don't understand. Attaching "cyber", "e", "online" or even "with a computer" to something does NOT make it a new threat. And "Cyber Pearl Harbor"? Gimme a damn break. There is no need to try and compare unlawful access to a computer system by a foreign entity to an attack that killed thousands of people and drew the US into one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.

Espionage is espionage, regardless of wether it's someone sneaking documents out of a building or tapping into someone's computer system. Just because something happens on a computer does not automatically make it a new class of crime for which there must be an immediate expenditure of untold sums of taxpayer money.

So please, governments....stop with the crap already...

Re:Please, just stop...

[Penurious Penguin]

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.

Re:Please, just stop...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Please, just stop...

[SB9876]

Ummmmmmm...
Have you just not been reading anything at all about the pervasive SCADA security holes that keep popping up everywhere? Hooking industrial control hardware to the internet to centralize monitoring, control and update has been a huge industry movement. Combine that with a mindset in the SCADA industry and end users that is much more focused on reliability than security and you get the equivalent of thousands of pieces of hardware on the internet with the security equivalent of a wireless router with the default admin account and password.

The SCADA security holes have only recently come to the attention of the industry. I can assure you that there's a giant collective brick being shat over it but fixing this stuff takes time.

And foaming at the mouth about honest mistakes isn't going to solve anything.

Re:Please, just stop...

[johnnick]

>The bacteria that enter the drinking supply poisons a good portion of an entire city and thousands (if not tens of thousands) die.

Because no one, not even the people there at the plant, notice that the sewage is going into the water, and no one notices that the water smells funny, etc., etc. NYC is dealing with something like this right now in the wake of hurricane Sandy. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/30/hurricane-sandy-sewage-toxic-_n_2046963.html.

Killing people with computers is a LOT harder than killing them with kinetic weapons because, aside from people being monitored by computers in hospitals, most people aren't directly relying on the computers to keep them alive.

The north eastern US suffered a major, multi-day blackout a few years ago. It did not bring the country to its knees. Similarly, regional weather events may shut down transit/business/etc., but people are moving to backup systems (e.g., walking/biking to work in the case of NYC) and dealing for the time it will take to bring the systems back online.

Any cyber attack that could actually meaningfully harm the US would cross the line into casus belli and likely receive a kinetic response.

It's possible that some kind of cyber attack could be used as a distraction or to syphon off resources while a kinetic attack takes place, but that's still assuming some other nation believes it is in their national interests to get into a shooting match with the US.

Sen. Lieberman had an opinion piece in the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/10/17/should-industry-face-more-cybersecurity-mandates/the-cyber-threat-is-real-and-must-be-stopped-by-business-and-government) supporting your position. Numerous real security professionals would disagree, from Bruce Schneier (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/stoking_cyber_f.html) to people like Scot Terban (http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/10/stoking_cyber_f.html).

Re:Please, just stop...

[Absolutely.Geek]

As someone who works with this stuff all the time, I feel I can say this with some degree of authority, if you connect your SCADA / PLC system DIRECTLY to a internet connected PC. You should be drawn and quartered / keel hauled for pure stupidity.

I have access to some of my customers sites remotely, all of them are through secure VPN then either RDP from the secure connection or in one case through citrix to the computer in question. If their IT dept can't sort out VPN security that is another issue entirely.

When it comes to industrial gear stability is #1, #2, #3 and #4 on the list of priorities, and #5 is physical security, most plants that I have worked at are fenced and require you to go through a gate house of some sort before you can enter site, this is not because they are doing some super secrete work it is for liability issues, if some retard sneaks onto the site and gets an arm ripped off because they put their hand in some bit of plant, the fines and paperwork would be hideous.

Most computers on industrial sites will be running unpatched XP SP2, but it is ok because there should not be any internet connection to these machines. USB's should also be limited to trusted ones for backups.

Ok rant over.....I could go on....

sorry leon

[Lehk228]

Sorry leon, /b/ still is not your personal army

Worried about cyber perl harbor? Give me a break.

[Anonymous Coward]

If that were true, it would have already happened by now. I mean, wtf are the US's enemies waiting for?

Here's what someone said back in 1998:

PREPARED STATEMENT OF SENATOR FRED THOMPSON
CHAIRMAN

COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS

MAY 19, 1998

"WEAK COMPUTER SECURITY IN GOVERNMENT: IS THE PUBLIC AT RISK?"

The Governmental Affairs Committee today is holding the first of a series of hearings on the security of federal computer systems. The potential benefits promised by computers are contrasted with inherent risks to our security and public safety. While advances in computing power potentially can remake how the government does business and how future wars are fought, it also creates vulnerabilities which must be reduced. Today’s hearing will address the darker side of the information revolution while exploring how we can better protect government information.

Computers are changing our lives faster then any other invention in our history. Our society is becoming increasingly dependent on information technologies, which are changing at an amazing rate. Consider a couple of examples:

The singing greeting cards which you buy today for $2 have more computing power then existed in the world before 1950.

A video camera which you buy today for less then $1000 has more computing power then a 1960s computer the size of this room.

Combine this rapid explosion in computing power with the fact that information systems are being connected together around the world without regard to geographic boundaries. The increasing ability of computers talking to each other offers both opportunities and challenges.

In today’s hearing, we will discuss these challenges. We will hear that the nature of this challenge comes from the fact that our nation’s underlying information infrastructure is riddled with vulnerabilities which represent severe security flaws and risks to our nation’s security, public safety and personal privacy.

While "hacker attacks" receive much media attention, what worries me are the attacks that go unknown. The nature of attacks in the information age seems to allow a malicious individual or group to reach out and inflict extensive damage from the comfort and safety of their home.

We must ask whether we are becoming so dependent on communications links and electronic microprocessors that a determined adversary or terrorist could possibly shut down federal operations or damage the economy simply by attacking our computers.

At risk are systems that control power distribution and utilities, phones, air traffic, stock exchanges, the Federal Reserve, and taxpayers’ credit and medical records. Unfortunately, government agencies are ill-prepared to address the situation. We as a nation cannot wait for the "Pearl Harbor" of the information age. We must increase our vigilance to tackle this problem before we are hit with a surprise attack.

Our witnesses today have substantial knowledge about what the problems really are and can recommend solutions. First, Dr. Peter Neumann, a recognized private-sector expert on computer security, will provide the Committee with an overview of information security issues and testify on the systemic security problems in the government’s computer systems.

Then we will hear from L0pht -- seven members of a "hacker think tank" who identify security weaknesses in computer systems in an effort to persuade companies to design more secure systems. L0pht members will testify about specific weaknesses which enable hackers to exploit the nation’s information infrastructure and government information.

Excuse me if I can't take the government seriously about preventing a cyber "Pearl Harbor". What'll happen is that there will be some attack w

I'll work cheap...

[GodfatherofSoul]

...just hook me up with some of them Colombian hookers the Secret Service has been recruiting for their Randy Reserves.

More like dividing and conquering

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

New Perl Harbor: The Sequel

[Penurious Penguin]

New Pearl Harbor is a melodramatic pre-imagining of the teenage attack on U.S. power-grids and the subsequent DooAlittleMoreThanNecessary Raid. While not directed by Michael Bay, fans of his in the CIA have collaborated with the makers of Innocence of Muslims and Rupert Murdoch in this captivating mind-wrenching sequel.

"When you see the part where Leonardo DiCaprio telnets into the Pentagon and sends drones to Moldova, you'll shit your pants!" -- Sock Puppet Reviews

"If you told me Justin Bieber could've played such a convincing hacker, I'd have laughed in your face" -- Hillary Clinton

"It brought tears to my eyes, and I was a POW." -- J. McCain

"Thank Yahweh for benzodiazepines! " -- Janet Napolitano (Eight-Time Mother of the Year Award Winner)

"You'll need your Mountain Dew for this one!" -- Anonymous

*Partially plagiarized from wikipedia.

Military Intelligence

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't we all get into technology for the meetings, the red tape, the bureaucracy, the TPS reports, the PHBs (pointy haired bosses)

In no particular order, the Heroes at Homeland Security will clap the leg-irons onto all their tame geeks, will lock down every box, will firewall every internal network, will take away every admin priv, will assign a "handler" to every geek with veto authority on every mouse click. And then? Of course the token techies will be crucified for not being able to use their non-existent resources to defend Wal-Mart from the script kiddies

They're looking for scapegoats my friends, don't fall for it

Every time I read or hear "Homeland" I think

[3seas]

Hitler and the motherland....

welcome back to the 90's!

[datapharmer]

Does that website actually use tables? maybe one of the first "1337 skilz" they get should be someone that knows how to use something newer than frontpage 2000 and knows better than to put an unobfuscated email addresses like infragardteam@infragard.org as a contact link.... unless this is a honeypot those poor bastards are going to get a serious introduction to spam. How clueless.