Slashdot Mirror
Real-World Cyber City Used To Train Cyber Warriors
Orome1 writes "NetWars CyberCity is a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop. It was developed to teach cyber warriors from the U.S. military how online actions can have kinetic effects. Developed in response to a challenge by U.S. military cyber warriors, NetWars CyberCity is an intense defensive training program organized around missions. 'We've built over eighteen missions, and each of them challenges participants to devise strategies and employ tactics to thwart computer attacks that would cause significant real-world damage,' commented Ed Skoudis, SANS Instructor and NetWars CyberCity Director."
NetWars CyberCity is a small-scale city located close by the New Jersey Turnpike complete with a bank, hospital, water tower, train system, electric power grid, and a coffee shop.
You take out the electricity, and we will all stumble around wondering how to connect to the net...
You take out the coffee shop, and you will find us all focused on your destruction (or on finding another source of coffee, whichever happens first.)
and... just to keep this one going: http://xkcd.com/705/
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
There's... sex, drugs, & rock n' roll... but maybe not for most slashdotters, enjoy your insanity sir.
As long as the director of the water treatment plant doesn't want to drive in to work at 3 am in the morning to press a button to fix a problem... yes. Good luck making the security through obscurity argument to that person.
I wouldn't be surprised if the mayor and council or DPW chief of some small town arranged to have their water tower wired by some lowest-bid contractor just to show off to other local small towns. "Your town installed halogen street lamps in the commercial district? Well mine just put our water supply on the 'information superhighway'! Check it out, the password is '1-2-3-4' . . ."
They have it wrong. It's on a tabletop. The goal of NetWars is to have a predefined and cheap proving ground for doing cyber war games, essentially. It doesn't require a literal city. And the tabletop thing is for the "ooh and ahhh" factor with brass.
From the recent SANS NewsBite entry about it:
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
So if you're just some shmo in your parents' basement, you're a hacker (or cracker.. or worst, a terrorist), but when you're part of the military, you're a friggin 'cyber warrior'?? Seriously, that's just fucking stupid.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Glad to see ALL the bases are covered...
The word "cyber" is like "cloud" or "pirate". Every time you hear it, you know for a fact, that the writer doesn't know shit about computers or the Internet. Same goes for iDevice (/ Win 8/Phone) and Twitter users, but they additionally like to pretend they are "hip" in a ridiculously cringe-worthy fashion. At least they got that cringe-worthiness part in common with the former group.
'We've built over eighteen missions, and each of them challenges participants to devise strategies and employ tactics to thwart computer attacks that would cause significant real-world damage'
Then don't connect your vital infrastructure to the INTERNET !!!
AccountKiller
A determined enough attacker(s) can punch through just about anything in time. The only way to truly secure a network permanently is to unplug it from the rest of the world. VPN isn't an exception.
Consider how many government organizations have been compromised by an email with an attachment or a link lately. With just that single port open to the water's network, multiple attack vectors immediately present themselves that don't necessarily involve brute forcing the vpn.
In "Being John Malkovich" you would shoot out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike once you got kicked out of his brain.