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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.'"

10 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Re:NO! by ColdWetDog · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  2. Cyber Reserve? by chill · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
    1. Re:Cyber Reserve? by siddesu · · Score: 5, Funny

      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

  3. 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/
  4. Assembling? by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 5, Funny

    Or rounding up?

    [puts on tinfoil hat]

  5. Please, just stop... by FSWKU · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    --
    "So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."
    1. 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.

    2. Re:Please, just stop... by SB9876 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  6. 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.

  7. Re:If it worked like the Army reserve, I'd be in. by girlinatrainingbra · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.