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.

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.

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...

[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...

[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....

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.

Every time I read or hear "Homeland" I think

[3seas]

Hitler and the motherland....