Air Force Network Admins Found Out About Drone Virus Through News Story 161
Nemesisghost writes "Wired's Danger Room reports that the network admins of the 24th Air Force found out about the virus infecting the drone cockpits at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada by reading the earlier news article. Quoting: 'Not only were officials in charge kept out of the loop about an infection in America’s weapon and surveillance system of choice, but the surprise surrounding that infection highlights a flaw in the way the U.S. military secures its information infrastructure: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of. The four branches of the U.S. armed forces each has a dedicated unit that, in theory, is supposed to handle cyber defense for the entire service. ... In practice, it’s not that simple. Unlike most big private enterprises, the 24th doesn’t have a centralized system for managing and monitoring its networks. There’s no place at the 24th’s San Antonio headquarters where someone could see all the digital traffic hurtling through the service’s pipes.'"
YAY (Score:5, Insightful)
Compartmentalization AND Security through obscurity.
You can't make this stuff up.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Funny. I've never heard of the USAF being referred to as "the Thinkers". Sorry, but I have little use for the Air Force. Anything they can do, the Army and the Navy can do. The Air Force can make no such counterclaim. I have higher regard for the Royal Air Force. Those boys get down and dirty with their sister services. The Royal Air Force even has it's own infantry, capable of securing and defending a base in a forward operating area. http://www.raf.mod.uk/rafregiment/ [raf.mod.uk] The USAF relies on the depar
Re:YAY (Score:4, Interesting)
You know... you might be saying that being funny.
However, I think you truly have a point. At least I really hope so. What is claimed in this article makes Air Force cyber security look so weak and pathetic that whoever they have tasked to do it could not qualify for a job with the Geek Squad.
If our security really is that weak.... why the hell are we worried about terrorists taking over civilian aircraft still when they could remotely take over a bunch of armed drones and attack military and civilian targets with our own advanced weaponry?
Re:YAY (Score:4, Funny)
If our security really is that weak.... why the hell are we worried about terrorists taking over civilian aircraft still when they could remotely take over a bunch of armed drones and attack military and civilian targets with our own advanced weaponry?
I think it may be more difficult to get the good PS3 controllers in the desert, and even when they do, the sand just wreaks havok on them.
Re: (Score:2)
You're surprised? (Score:3)
I am.
The fact that they don't have a means of broadcasting alerts to the technicians is a sign of an absolutely scary level of incometence.
Are the launch codes for the nuclear arsenal as well protected and monitored as the drones? If so, the entire world should be terrified of American incompetence.
Re: (Score:2)
Incompetence? From the people who allowed the tail to wag the dog so long that we built a military so many times bigger than we ever needed, that we go around playing world police with it...on our own dime?
Yah, "competence" is exactly what I would expect from a people so gullible that they get dragged into conflicts all over the globe every few years.
Re: (Score:2)
If it got in at all, then it's not as closed a network as it ought to be. If they can't remove it, then they're either truly incompetent, or it's one nasty piece of software (probably targeted).
I hope you're right, but I kinda doubt it.
Re:YAY (Score:4, Insightful)
It is kinda insane. The Army, Navy, Marines, and (of course) Air Force all have flying vehicles. I think if it flies, it should be handled by the Air Force, period. If you need special forces stuff like SOAR [wikipedia.org], then they should be an air forces special division. Similarly, the Navy ought to handle the boats (save for the Coast Guard, which is separate for a good reason), the Army should handle infantry, etc.
I really don't get why there's all these branches of the military with overlapping roles - branches who don't talk to one another. That's how stuff like this happens. You really need one organization to handle something like networking but you end up with 4 or 5. Bureaucracy at its finest!
What? (Score:4, Insightful)
What you've just suggested is the same error clueless bureaucrats make about technology, except in reverse; the other side of the same coin.
PHBs who have no idea how computers or networks work say to organize or administrate them in a way that makes sense for organizing tangible items with physical problems, but utterly fails when applied to computers.
You have suggested organizing the branches of the military according to the way a computer network should be organized. Worse, you've suggested this not only regarding the branches' computer networks, but also regarding military operations.
Not only do you ignore the inter-service cooperation that already exists, but you ignore the pointless extra division that your idea would entail, like having AF pilots flying aircraft off carriers or flying Blackhawks full of Army troops. In both cases, the AF pilots would be working exclusively with members of the other branch, so what would the point be of having them under a different CoC? They'd end up assigned to TDY under another branch...in which case they might as well be in that branch in the first place. It really doesn't help unit cohesion to have artificial divisions between, e.g. the chopper pilots and the troops they carry around and support.
Are you even aware that the Marines are under the Department of the Navy? Sheesh.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
It is kinda insane. The Army, Navy, Marines, and (of course) Air Force all have flying vehicles. I think if it flies, it should be handled by the Air Force
IF you knew your history of Army Aviation, and such you'd know that the Air Force has no interest in providing the Marines and Army with what they want. In fact, when drones started becoming big, the Air Force specifically said they would not touch anything that doesn't fly above 10,000ft. So what will the Army or Marine Corps do if the Air Force doesn't want to provide them with the Close Air Support and low level surveillance that they need? They will roll their own of course! And it's the Air Force's l
Re: (Score:2)
Even if you merged them all into one unified "branch", you'd still have basically the same thing as I suggested. It's not like the Army has cavalry (tanks) training alongside infantry for no good reason or something. You'd have major departments who would handle specific functions, and then subdivisions of those departments would be sent where needed (so fighter pilots trained by the AIr Force to launch off of ships would be attached to carrier groups, for instance).
Combining the whole military would at lea
Re: (Score:2)
No idea how things have gone since I finished my tour, but back in 2000 the USMC was unloading all internal IT knowledge and moving to consultants. If the Airforce made the same move, this could entirely be due to a private corporation that our militarty is dependent on keeping quiet to protect their contract and having an individual leak the story to the press.
That would explain why the DoD had no idea about it until the story was published.
-Rick
Gee I wonder why you have viruses (Score:1)
do they even bother to check ... apparently not
Were they also surprised ... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not sure about "recently". This has been reported time and again for years. I recall reading on Slashdot quite some time back on how people in Pakistan were able to watch drone transmissions using cheap television decoders.
Re:Were they also surprised ... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, because that is intentional.
If you encrypt it, you have to distribute the decryption keys. That's not a trivial task when you're talking about military situations. You have to deal with unreliable communications, the possibility of a unit being overrun and keys captured, and distributing new keys regularly over a very wide area to units from several countries. Now remember that any of these problems don't merely cause downtime, but get troops killed.
Or you just transmit the video unencrypted.
The assumption was any adversary sophisticated enough to receive the video would also have the minimal radar and signals capabilities to detect the presence of the drones anyway, so the video itself would not be all that helpful.
That assumption doesn't hold with the conflicts we are currently fighting, so they're trying to figure out if it's sufficiently worthwhile to encrypt the data with the problems that would cause.
Re: (Score:3)
No, you're talking about distribution of the keys on the drones. That isn't a problem, since the drones return to a relatively safe base regularly.
What is a problem is you want the soldiers on the ground to be able to see the video, any time, under fire or not, even if their network connection has been down for months, even if they belong to another nation.
It's not easy to enter a new key while someone's dropping mortar rounds all around you, assuming you can even get the correct people on the radio.
Transm
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not convinced this is an issue - it just requires a MITM.
Drone talks to satellite. Satellite talks to base.
Handheld PC talks to satellite. Satellite talks to base.
Base can send whatever to whoever.
You don't need to have point-to-point shared keys between every drone and every PC in the world. You can change the keys for any device at any time and nobody needs to know that it happened except for the base's computer, and the device's computer.
If the drone gets captured ideally the keys are hardened, bu
Re: (Score:2)
Command and control works that way, but the Predator broadcasts video directly to units within line-of-sight of the drone. Which is kinda the point - friendly units only need basic RF gear to watch the video. Again, one can't assume constant data or radio contact back to HQ for key distribution or video feed. For example, during the first Iraq war an entire US brigade was out of contact with H
Re: (Score:2)
Or if the soldier isn't part of a US or NATO unit, there's the distinct possibility that the ground terminal will get "lost". "Lost" crypto gear with valid keys upsets people. And you can't have a frequent key rotation because you can't count on reliable communications with the ground units to send the new keys.
Put a unique key in each piece of communications equipment. You only send broadcasts encrypted with keys that the targeted receivers can decode. The main risk I'd see is if somebody clones the device undetected, so that it doesn't get revoked. However, that cloned key is only of use receiving signals specifically addressed to that receiver, and only until the key is rotated. Also, if the encryption is asymmetric and two-way and the right algorithm is used to negotiate the session key then you can't even
Re: (Score:2)
Remember your adversary can detect that there is a drone in the area and it's transmitting video even if they can't decode the video.
The reaction of the adversary in such a situation is to assume all of their positions are being observed...which they should do even if they can see the video camera is pointed at one position. It doesn't take a long time to point the camera somewhere else.
Re: (Score:2)
Which works as long as everyone with an RVT is a US unit.
Now what do you do if the drone is supporting troops from another nation? Do you want to hand out crypto gear to the Afghan or Iraqi Army?
There's a trade-off to be made. The decision to encrypt or transmit in the clear isn't as black-and-white as most slashdotters assume.
Re: (Score:2)
Unless the latency is THAT big of a deal, the RVTs shouldn't know how to decrypt UAV video. They should just know how to decrypt a stream of video sent to them from the base, and the base needs to know how to decrypt the UAV's video.
If you capture an RVT then it can play whatever videos it was already authorized to play, until the base figures out is is missing and stops broadcasting the session keys encrypted with that particular RVT's key.
This stuff was solved ages ago by the likes of DirecTV/etc. Your
Re: (Score:2)
The video is transmitted directly by the drone. Not by the base. This is because you can't count on reliable communications with the base. For example, a US Brigade was out of contact with their HQ for 3 days during the first Iraq war.
If you could count on reliable communicat
Re: (Score:2)
Well, if nothing else the drone could be given the field unit's public key and instructed to encrypt the session key using it by the base. Clearly the base can talk to the drone since that is where it is piloted from. And, if the drone can talk to the base and talk to the troops, it can also function as a repeater - we're talking about sending a couple of bytes on a channel that is otherwise sending a video feed, so it isn't like this is creating bandwidth constraints or otherwise increasing the RF profil
Re: (Score:2)
Generally, those don't work outside your own nation's military. Only major exception are the close NATO allies. But one can't assume you're only transmitting video to US, British and German units.
Shenanigans (Score:2)
I wonder how much porn and illicit downloading goes through the military networks? In all the other computer networks I've seen, if no one is holding users accountable, the network will be abused.
So, tell me, again, how the virus got on the machines? A "thumb drive," you say? And, the virus keeps returning? Hrmmm...
Who thought this network infrastructure arrangement would be a good idea?
Re: (Score:1)
USB drives are banned on at least US Air Force networks, your user account will get disabled if you even plug one in.
Re: (Score:2)
From what I read in another article, they were using portable hard drives to do map updates and download the footage as the systems are not attached to the main network. Now the drives appear to be infected as well as other computers so tracking down all of the sources of the virus and eliminating them requires a lot of sneakernetting.
Re: (Score:3)
Not much. They use proxies and whitelists. Your average elementary school is less locked down than the military networks.
If you're going to claim incompetence on their part, you could at least RTFA. Portable hard disks used to transfer map updates from network-connected systems to the isolated network where the drones operate.
Airgapped (Score:2)
It keeps happening... (Score:2)
Just about every possible problem has been discussed on slashdot before.
Trying simple things to lock down military PC's such as sealing up CD-ROM/DVD drives and USB ports is defeated by the motivation of troops wanting to listen to his MP3 collection or view family videos.
Then the security of actual networks isn't done because the admin's are also engaged in regular military duties. They only have enough time to get any system setup before moving to the next assigned work task.
Research groups also have stud
Re: (Score:2)
Trying simple things to lock down military PC's such as sealing up CD-ROM/DVD drives and USB ports is defeated by the motivation of troops wanting to listen to his MP3 collection or view family videos.
Not so. It's thwarted by the officer in charge (civilian or military) not saying "NO!".
And then thwarted by not having an automatic scan of the thumb drive on insertion.
Re: (Score:2)
It really doesn't help that the military use Windows for this stuff. Windows is not a Trusted OS. (If you read through all the literature on trust across multiple devices connected together, the upshot is that it should not be possible to violate Mandatory Access Controls. You should not be able to write data that is of a higher security setting than the device you are writing to can support. MAC is always inherited, so no program on an untrusted device should ever run at higher privilege than the subset of
Re: (Score:2)
Ahh, yes. POSIX - sure, Windows is POSIX-certified ...
Re: (Score:2)
... exactly! :)
Re: (Score:2)
"Then the security of actual networks isn't done because the admin's are also engaged in regular military duties."
That's because the AF combined career fields and merged the welfare-queen Admin field with the computer folks. Whoever made that decision deserves a blanket party....
Re: (Score:2)
The computers that troops use for personal use shouldn't have any sensitive information on them and they shouldn't have any access to it either. Granted the troops themselves will have access to information that's sensitive, but that's a different matter than this.
Next time ... (Score:2)
Consolidation is Needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
When nuclear weapons were new, each branch of the military tried to become the 'nuclear' arm by introducing new weapons systems and trying to impress politicos with how they should be the ones with the budget and prestige. We don't need multiple branches of cybersecurity forces, we need one branch that can handle it all. Time to dump the military romanticism of the 18th century that divides our military into earth/water/air/fire/heart and reorg. Hell, maybe we even need another side to the Pentagon for cyberwarfare.
Perhaps not. If you have ONE system that gets compromised and the whole shooting match is compromised. This way, the system is so screwed up that it takes years to figure out who's on first.
Re: (Score:3)
Nonsense. Leadership and giving the right ORDERS works fine.
You can TELL the military to stop using Windows tomorrow and they either do that or it's UCMJ time. The example is extreme but real.
A lot of cybersecurity would be to reduce bullshit computer use. Take away options. Take unclassified systems off the internet or filter them heavily.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Heaven help us if you take away their animated cursors
Re: (Score:2)
Time to dump the military romanticism of the 18th century
Yes, it is, but the consequence is not to reduce the armed forces to a professional core and a citizen's militia whose mandate is national defense not fighting wars. Wars are not and cannot ever be anything but the result of irrationality, romantic or otherwise. Unless it is in direct, on-the-ground defense of their homes soldiers all fight for non-rational reasons, and wars are always fought for non-rational reasons.
By all means dump military romanticism. You'll end up like the Swiss: heavily armed, pe
Re: (Score:3)
cyber command (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3)
If this is the best the most elite hackers our military can muster, then I think my wife should try and apply. She knows how to use Excel pretty well.
In fact that is exactly how military works. They hire mostly people with high school education and train them into career fields. Cyber command started just over a year ago. Apparently you think the military should be able to train up people in 1 year for what takes colleges 4 years to do.
I prefer to think of them as CS college sophomores... they're still thinking about switching majors because "math is hard."
Re: (Score:2)
That approach used to work, prior to the US Army Air Corps., there wasn't much in the way of pilots available so, they had to train them quickly after enlistment. Especially since the pilots that were available didn't come with dog fighting strategies already in hand. Cybersecurity isn't a new field and trying to train people from scratch without having the infrastructure in place is just going to end badly.
I'm not really sure what the solution is, but it strikes me as naive to assume that just because they
Oh wow, I am sooo impressed with the volunteer .. (Score:2)
So in other words... (Score:1)
We don't and probably won't ever really know the true nature of this virus. Assuming there is a C&C outside the network or a traitor inside, the thing probably was either told to self-destruct, plant a bogus virus and delete its trace - or it was manually deleted. And since no one was actively monitoring the systems, I'm guessing their logs and back-ups are in such a disarray that forensics won't yield much about the original infection.
*sarcasm* way to go, Obama. You can hire the world's best data minin
start by hiring people based on skills and not BA (Score:2)
start by hiring people based on skills and not BA's. It IT hands on work / training / tech school is a lot better then a 4 year CS class load.
Also there needs to be a way to get tech people in with out the boot camp part and or having to deal all the rank crap or the move up or get out idea. Some tech people can do good as a manager other not so much.
Also no stay away from lot's of non tech mangers.
Re: (Score:2)
... I'm technical and I made it in boot camp (USMC). Every Marine a rifleman. Its not hard and they don't just want IT people. Yes maybe if we get rid of boot camp and increase the pay for certain jobs and stop requiring everyone know how to shoot then the IT staff might be a little better, but I really doubt by much. There are some smart guys in the military things like this are usually a management issue.
well you want IT people to be IT not rifleman or o (Score:2)
... I'm technical and I made it in boot camp (USMC). Every Marine a rifleman. Its not hard and they don't just want IT people. Yes maybe if we get rid of boot camp and increase the pay for certain jobs and stop requiring everyone know how to shoot then the IT staff might be a little better, but I really doubt by much. There are some smart guys in the military things like this are usually a management issue.
well you want IT people to be IT not rifleman or other stuff that can let then be pulled from the IT to a non IT rifleman job even more so for a state side job.
Also there are IT people who are to old for boot camp and or are hacker types / people with Asburger / other stuff who can do a IT job but can't be the type of person you want on the front lines as a rifleman or the people who will fail boot camp.
It needs to be out side of the enlisted / officer side of things. Maybe direct commission like with scien
Re: (Score:2)
well you want IT people to be IT not rifleman or other stuff that can let then be pulled from the IT to a non IT rifleman job even more so for a state side job.
IIRC 'every man a rifleman' is characteristic of the Marines, and not the same as other branches. The Marines consider it very important that every member of the team can operate that way. This is related to the particular job that Marines are intended to do, operating as small groups often out of touch with higher levels of command. So everyone on the team has to be able to pick up the slack when they lose someone. (IANA military guy - I've just read a lot.)
It's worth noting that in Desert Storm the Ma
Um, no one finds this suspicious or irresponsible? (Score:2)
First, it seems like Wired has motive for some exaggeration or misrepresentation here: "Our investigative reporting is so top notch they don't even know they're being investigated!" Certainly major exposes make it to press without a leak, it happens all the time, but any journalistic
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
So apparently Wired had the story in the first place, and now they have a second story reporting that the Air Force never knew about the problem until reading about it in their first story? There are two serious problems here.
Not if you bothered to read the article. Here is the first paragraph:
Some people in the Air Force
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps a bit of mental clouding is to be expected among individuals who run a weapon system "allowing U.S. forces to attack targets and spy on its foes without risking American lives"—apparently by killing them [mediaite.com]. Doublethink and duckspeak aren't conducive to organizational efficiency...but that's the price you have to pay to keep the terrorists from winning.
Uh, anybody who joins the military should know that their primary function is killing people, or making other people more effective at killing people, or otherwise helping to kill people. I'm not sure how that results in mental clouding - pretty smart people have been killing each other since the dawn of time.
And inefficient organizations are hardly something unique to the military. When people find a mistake in their records how many people drop what they're doing and call the corporate auditing group to
Another 9/11 ... By our own drone? (Score:1)
Single switch? (Score:2)
from TFA: There’s no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak
Maybe it's for the better. If there was a central control of whole network it would make it a great target for attack.
The 24th AF is just starting (Score:2)
Part of the shuffling around that created Cybercommand also created the 24th Air Force to be the AF's IT shop. They're still standing up and taking over operations from all the separate units.
So it's not completely surprising they wouldn't know about it. They may not have taken over at that base yet.
Utter Bullshite (Score:1)
1) The network goons know they should report it. They dun goofed, they are in BIG trouble.
2) Had this virus been on a network that crosses into the Internet then it WOULD be detected. End of story. Even if it didn't cross into the Internet, it was detected by HBSS - aka anti-virus. Somehow the reporting dun broke down.
3) There will be fallout but most of this is FUD, telling the narrative "OMG teh US Military is not ready for CyberWarz!" Ok, chicken little, settle down... unless you are a airman in the
Re: (Score:1)
Hey wait a second y'all! (Score:1)
An RFC for Weapons Systems Control Networks (Score:1)
Think STUXnet.
Or perhaps SINOnet?
Paranoid? Or not paranoid enough?
Re: (Score:1)
analyze your own data streams FTW (Score:2)
One would think analyzing your own data traffic would be a good thing. sheesh...
Re: (Score:2)
I think it would not be so difficult to know the difference between expected data streams and unexpected data streams without ever knowing the content of the streams. IP addresses, MACs, ports, and any app info is all you need. There is no need for deep inspection.
Another reason not to use WIndows (Score:2)
If they're stupid enough to use Windows, why should we expect them to be smart about anything else? I was hoping the military would be more sensible than to use an OS with a history of security issues. It's only a matter of time before terrorists manage to hit us with our own weapons. It's pretty pathetic when we grow up in a computer centric culture and yet we allow people without adequate computer knowledge manage IT in the military as well as companies.
Networking engineers tend to be fairly braindead. Th
Disgraceful (Score:2)
"There's no one in the Defense Department with his hand on the network switch. In fact, there is no one switch to speak of. "
I am shocked that US runs it's country like this, build a big switch and glue someone's hand to it immediately you crazy fools.
lol (Score:2)
It's not so much that they had a virus... (Score:2)
What's really amazing is that no one at Creech AFB bothered to tell their cybersecurity guys for two weeks even after they knew they had it. Imagine that! For two weeks!!! So, since no one outside Creech knew of the exploit it makes me wonder who broke the store that finally informed the security folks. Obvsiously someone at Creech who knew about the virus and was somewhat upset that no one was reporting it.
The USAF has more problems than just security. It has some serious disciplinary issues.
Everyone makes mistakes, but... (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
And I thought it was bad when we find out about virus infections when our firewall blocks the spambot...
Said it before, saying it again... (Score:2)
Of course the really secret weapons (buried by the opposition under Soviet and American cities) are probably still just as effective as they were when deployed in the 60s and 70s.
Re: (Score:3)
This has nothing to do with taxes.
The military finds funding when it needs it.
This is mostly a failure of leadership.
Unless something comes from the top down, their networks will remain a group of islands.
It took a 9/11 for us to reform our intelligence sharing and it'll probably take the internet equivalent before the military to puts their house in order.
Re: (Score:1)
I've worked at 1 Army installation in my short life, but from my experience, people move up in the ranks by tenure -- not skill or experience. Even in IT.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
DNS? Department of Network Security?
I'm not sure I want to see the end result of a large government bureaucracy trying to manage multiple secure networks.
Re: (Score:2)
um you already are seeing the end of the results of a large government bureaucracy trying to handle multiple insecure networks.
The problem is no one does good security. It has to be installed ground up and thought out ahead of time, with the needs of the users, limitations of technology, need of oversight, and management thought about from an objective point of view.
it is either to tight to allow for actual use by users. the flights systems need thumb drives to transfer GPS data into and images out of tho
Re: (Score:2)
They can find all the funding they like, but if your K-12 schools are teaching that dinosaurs and humans walked paw-in-hand and that computers are the work of a demon-possessed Steve Jobs, then you've got a group of people fundamentally (!) incapable of network management.
80% of all you learn, you learn before you are 12. You HAVE to get the key aspects of science, engineering, mathematics and rigorous thought TOTALLY in people's brains by that time. If you do not, you are too late. Those who haven't learne
Re: (Score:2)
They are most certainly not teaching about a 'demon possessed Steve Jobs". If you would bother to read the voluminous eulogies on Mr. Jobs, you would see that he is about to be Sainted.
Fair and Unbalanced!
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
"By the time someone is 24, they will have mentally peaked."
I don't know what you are measuring here but it certainly isn't true of some university professors. Many of those people do their best work in their 50's and 60's because it takes that long to build up enough knowledge and understand relationships among ideas in order to come up with something new.
I suspect something similar happens to the rest of us. At 24, you are still a baby and have experienced very little of life. It usually takes until 30's
Re: (Score:2)
For a similar problem, see safety, and specifically how China's
Re: (Score:2)
Top-down control is inadequate for problems of this nature. Security needs to be a priority at the top, sure, but you need to be able to give lower-level people the ability to actually accomplish things, and work with their peers to make things happen.
I'm not sure you understand what I was talking about or what TFA is discussing.
We're not talking about top down control, we're talking about top down leadership.
The problem is exactly that "lower-level people [have] the ability to actually accomplish things"
The military doesn't have a unified architecture or plan for their network and that is a major weakness.
They need to create a plan to unify the disparate networks and (most importantly) execute that plan.
Things like Manning's theft of Diplomatic cables s
Re: (Score:2)
When you have armies of people who don't want to pay taxes this is what you get. Networking training is not cheap, understanding it is not cheap. Finding people with enough knowledge combined to work across these systems is difficult and comes with a price.
Oh blow it out your ass. The US spends over 698 Billion on it's military, more than 5 time as much as it's closest competitor: China Source. [sipri.org] If they cannot find the training budget for network security then maybe they can hold a fucking bake sale like most school districts have to in order to afford supplies.
Re: (Score:2)
Having that much money doesn't mean they're spending it as effectively as they could - I get the impression than an awful lot gets spent on shiny gadgets which defense contractors overcharge for, not to mention pork for Senator X's state. Sometimes this is stuff that the military doesn't really want or need.
Re: (Score:2)
WRONG fucking answer.
The .mil budgets are enormous, but Air Force customs regarding network management have been fucked up for many years.
"Networking training is not cheap, understanding it is not cheap. Finding people with enough knowledge combined to work across these systems is difficult and comes with a price."
The USAF capably trains people on tasks more demanding than networking, but MilPHBs who don't understand networking combined the computer maintenance folks and the welfare-queen/closet queen (yes,
Re: (Score:2)
You may have had a point if there had actually been any military budget cuts in the last decade.
Re: (Score:3)
Considering that defense, customs and border control are some of the few items actually set out in the Constitution as important activities of the federal government, that's probably a reasonably good thing. (Not to say that it's being done right now, I'm just sayin'). IIRC, for most of US history Defense was well over 1/2 of the total federal budget. Now it's somewhere close to 20%.
In the 1950s the entire Interstate Highway System was justified on defense grounds - the height of overpasses was set to al
Re: (Score:2)
Umm.. If you were in charge of the country, who would you make sure was first on the funding lists? Picking the group with the best armed people in the world, who were specifically trained to kill, doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Sticking them at the end of the list, where they won't ever see funding, would be a rather poor idea. Well, unless you want an armed revolution with no one to prote
Re: (Score:1)
Go Sparta!
Re: (Score:3)
There are some things that are just embarrassing though. This is one of them. The F22's avionics systems crashing due to crossing the international date line is another. It raises serious questions about how much we trust our armed forces to properly handle security.
I used to think that the stuxnet virus had a few oversights that were well beyond the incompetence level of the US government (the P2P update feature with hard-coded password being one) but this sort of thing suggests that in fact, when it co
Re: (Score:2)
They certainly don't want their efforts to go into a honeypot or enemy database of cyber attacks.
So they write each one from scratch (so it won't have Made in the XXX written on it) and write them poorly if it'll get the job done.
Think of the SIGINT work in WW2, if they
and run it like there high speed rail system? (Score:2)
it will end up just as bad with more cover ups.