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What If This Is The Most Important Thing The Government Can Do To Enhance Our Cybersecurity and Prepare us for Cyber War?

soviet-military-powerIn December 1998 when transitioning into a job doing intelligence support to DoD computer network defense, one of my mentors reminded me of a Reagan-era publication that helped the public better understand the Soviet threat called “Soviet Military Power.”  This document was based on the intelligence. It provided the best possible understanding of Soviet military hardware and operational concepts but was produced at an unclassified level so it could be broadly disseminated. My mentor was making the point to me that in my new role leading intelligence support to operational cyber defense I should champion something analogous in the cyber security domain.

I believe my mentor was right and advocate this idea whenever possible. Consider this theory: if more people are really aware of the cyber threat, they will take action. Citizens will better defend their portions of cyberspace and will also be more informed voters, meaning politicians will be better informed and pay more attention to cyber policy issues. Raising awareness of the cyber threat can also motivate a better the defensive posture of businesses.

I was given reason to think of this topic again on 9 March 2016 when DIA published a video capturing key background on this publication. See it at this link and embedded below:

When you watch that, imagine what something like this could do in the cyber war domain.

Do you agree the nation could benefit from something like this produced by the intelligence community focused on the cyber threat?

Till then you have other options on the threat. One I hope you take advantage of is my book The Cyber Threat.

Ensure your workforce is tracking the cyber threat by signing up for the OODA Daily Pulse.  This will provide strategic warning of threats and info on mitigation strategies.

And we most strongly recommend you review and track our section here on Cyber War, where we capture insights from some of the best thinkers in cyber conflict to help assess where we are and where we are going in this critical domain.

Related Posts:

Towards a Cyber Deterrent: Are we getting any closer?

What the New U.S. Intelligence Strategy Says About Cyber Threats

You think your business is primed to deal with any cyber threat – but what if it’s an inside job?

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It

Marc Goodman’s Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It  is a fantastic examination of good and evil in cyberspace. Marc really knows his material and on top of that writes incredibly well. I’ve been in and around the cybersecurity community for so long I find myself getting numbed by the constant news and really valued Marc placing so much threat information into a context anyone can understand. He writes in a way that everyone can understand and he covers materials that everyone should understand.

Marc starts the book off in a great way, anchoring us all in a reality that many in the cybersecurity community would recognize. He starts with how he was called into this world, then leads us directly into the dark world of technology enabled crime. From these roots in his past he then builds connections into what is happening today. But as the title of the book suggests, this is not about what was in the past or what is happening today. Marc points to trends that are leading us into tomorrow.

The book goes far beyond what is traditionally considered cyber security. It its on new and emerging fields of technology including robotics, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, synthetic biology, and of course the use of high powered computers to achieve criminal objectives. Marc also points us to optimistic/positive implications of technology and does so in ways that can inform our collective strategies going forward.

This is well worth a read.

futurecrimes

Additional Reading:

The Air Traffic Control System: We all assumed it was vulnerable, but now we know

WTF?: What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Fred Kaplan Explores The Secret History of Cyber War

What You Need To Know About The Administration’s Cybersecurity National Action Plan

Like Kip in Napoleon Dynamite, We love Technology

Breakthrough In Energy We Should All Track: New green technology generates electricity ‘out of thin air’

The Security Yearbook by Richard Stiennon

I Thought I Had Seen Some Crazy Things In The Intelligence Community, But Nothing Like Nuking The Moon

Consider This Defense Science Board Warning In Light of The OPM Hack

Now that we have all had time to digest the OPM hack (which is, to borrow a phrase from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, really big… you just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is), I would like to draw your attention back to something else. The Defense Science Board Report of January 2013 on the resilience of DoD systems to cyber attack.

After reviewing all available evidence and rigorously weighing threat information, a Task Force of the Defense Science Board (DSB) concluded that:

The United States cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent. 

How does that make you feel? You know yourself what adversaries are doing with well resourced attacks against the US healthcare industry where over 80 million of us have had our private information stolen. And you have read about the devastating OPM attacks that have compromised the personal information of all government employees plus the security clearance information associated with investigations and the people interviewed on investigations.  Now consider what a well resourced adversary could do to the US military when they decide to take offensive combat action against us. Well resourced adversaries could also offer these capabilities to lower tier adversaries to use against us for strategic advantage.

Read on for more about what the DSB reported as the threat to military systems.

Here are more details: 

The Defense Science Board (DSB) provides advice, assessments and reports as chartered by DoD leadership. It has studied cyber security and related topics for years and has been instrumental in providing new ideas and perspectives for action by DoD leadership.

The DSB was recently chartered to look at an interesting and somewhat intellectually stimulating topic, that of how US military systems could withstand cyber attack and remain able to execute their mission.  The chartered group, a task force on Resilient Military Systems, produced a report with a set of recommendations designed to improve DoD’s ability to accomplish its missions. The overarching strategy recommended by the DSB is one that enhanced the department’s defenses in the face of attacks, decreases the effectiveness of adversaries, increases the cost to adversaries, and deters the most significant adversaries by ensuring the US maintains the ability to deliver desired mission capabilities in the face of catastrophic cyber attack.

The task force also identified a framework to implement metrics collection systems and then develop appropriate performance metrics that can be used to shape DoD’s investment decisions. The report approved by DSB chairman Paul Kaminsky is at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports2010s.htm. It is also available at: Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat.

Here is more from the forwarding letter to the report:

The final report of the DSB Task Force on Resilient Military Systems is attached. This report is based on the perspective of 24 Task Force members who received more than 50 briefings from practitioners and senior officials throughout the Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), commercial sector, academia, national laboratories, and policymakers. This Task Force was asked to review and make recommendations to improve the resilience of DoD systems to cyber attacks, and to develop a set of metrics that the Department could use to track progress and shape investment priorities.

After conducting an 18-month study, this Task Force concluded that the cyber threat is serious and that the United States cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent utilizing cyber capabilities in combination with all of their military and intelligence capabilities (a “full spectrum” adversary). While this is also true for others (e.g. Allies, rivals, and public/private networks), this Task Force strongly believes the DoD needs to take the lead and build an effective response to measurably increase confidence in the IT systems we depend on (public and private) and at the same time decrease a would-be attacker’s confidence in the effectiveness of their capabilities to compromise DoD systems. This conclusion was developed upon several factors, including the success adversaries have had penetrating our networks; the relative ease that our Red Teams have in disrupting, or completely beating, our forces in exercises using exploits available on the Internet; and the weak cyber hygiene position of DoD networks and systems. The Task Force believes that the recommendations of this report create the basis for a strategy to address this broad and pervasive threat.

Nearly every conceivable component within DoD is networked. These networked systems and components are inextricably linked to the Department’s ability to project military force and the associated mission assurance. Yet, DoD’s networks are built on inherently insecure architectures that are composed of, and increasingly using, foreign parts. While DoD takes great care to secure the use and operation of the “hardware” of its weapon systems, the same level of resource and attention is not spent on the complex network of information technology (IT) systems that are used to support and operate those weapons or critical IT capabilities embedded within them.

DoD’s dependence on this vulnerable technology is a magnet to U.S. opponents. In fact, DoD and its contractor base have already sustained staggering losses of system design information incorporating decades of combat knowledge and experience that provide adversaries insight to technical designs and system use. Despite numerous DoD actions, efforts are fragmented, and the Department is not currently prepared to mitigate the threat.

That forwarding letter was signed by the task force co-chairs, Mr. Lewis Von Thaer and Mr. James R. Gosler, two of the most professional, well thought out leaders I have ever worked with.

Please dive deep into the full document now. You will find some information you already know, but I promise some surprises as well. Find more at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports2010s.htm

 

 

CTOvision Interviews CIA CIO Doug Wolfe on Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) Lessons Learned and Road Ahead

CIA CIO Doug Wolfe Interviewed on C2SWe recently had the opportunity to interview the CIA CIO, Doug Wolfe.

Doug has been the CIA’s CIO since 2013. In this role he oversees the agency information technology vision and strategic direction. He is also an advisor to the intelligence community CIO and a collaborative leader in the federal technology world. His past tours including serving as deputy director for acquisition, technology and facilities at the office of the director of national intelligence, inventing new sources and methods in the CIA’s S&T directorate, supporting launch and operations of multiple satellite systems at the National Reconnaissance Office and serving as the deputy CIO of the agency.

Doug also spent time in industry. Prior to the CIA he worked at Rocketdyne on the space shuttle’s main engine program. He has a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California and a master’s degree in system engineering from Virginia Tech

Many of us in the technology community have been tracking the exciting news about the CIA’s ability to leverage commercial advances in cloud computing via their Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) project. Since the enabling capability for C2S is provided by Amazon, C2S provides what is essentially an Amazon Web Services “zone” for Intelligence Community use. However, this zone is protected and operates in ways that keep it physically separate from the open Internet and logically part of the IT infrastructure of the Intelligence Community.

CTOvision readers no doubt immediately grasp the potential benefits of this approach, which include an ability to rapidly scale up and down compute when needed, a new agility for mission support, more comprehensive designs for security and more efficient use of resources overall. Now that the agency has been working with C2S we wanted to ask Doug for technical insights that can put this into context for us.

The following is from our discussion with Doug:

Gourley: Now that the agency has had time to start leveraging your C2S capabilities can you give us a feel for some of what has been accomplished?

Wolfe: C2S is up and open for business and serving a wide range of users from across the community. Some of what has been accomplished is foundational, like establishing concepts of operation and building out policy and process. Other foundational capabilities include working issues like connectivity to enterprise governance solutions.

C2S accomplishments also include support to multiple IT projects and programs. Of all the capabilities we are providing now, one that is very transformational has been what is occurring in support of agency software developers. We have given our developers repeatable ways of building development and test environments and made it easy for them to orchestrate the many business processes good development projects require. This has simplified their administrative requirements, empowered them with more functional development and test environments, and enabled a move to a DevOps approach. After developers start using C2S they soon realize they are spending less time on non-productive functions and can spend more time building real functionality. The result: developers are more agile, more efficient and can better support missions.

Gourley:  How will the IC benefit from commercial relationships you have developed with companies like Cloudera and Amazon via C2S?  Do you expect other technologies to come over to C2S in the near term and what are the key capabilities on the horizon?

Wolfe: With Amazon we have what is essentially a private AWS availability zone, which is now available to the Intelligence Community. Capabilities that AWS roles out to their own availability zones are made available to the community shortly thereafter. This means several things. One is that programs that leverage C2S do not need to make up-front investment in infrastructure to develop, configure, test and then host their capability. It also means that the many quality control and service management capabilities required to ensure consistently functioning applications is immediately available to programs. The same is true of our relationship with Cloudera via C2S. We wanted to provide developers with an easy way to access all the Apache Hadoop data framework, governance and security capabilities they will need, in one place, integrated into the way they work.

On the topic of data, we have found new approaches to data management have been very helpful in addressing our needs. Our needs center around working securely with a wide variety of data types. Developers need a framework that is knowable and repeatable for them to do this. Users need an infrastructure that is always on and available so they have the data they need for their mission. C2S now enables both those key functions.

Gourley: How do end users benefit from C2S?

Wolfe: C2S enables more reliable and functional delivery of services to end-users. One of the biggest benefits to date has been in delivering reliable and functional services to end users and doing it faster because developers have common and known and easy to work with environments. In most cases end users will not know C2S is delivering this capability. They just see more and better functionality. One category of functionality, for example, is in geospatial applications. Working with both our own and NGA’s technical teams we are leveraging C2S to deliver enhanced geospatial analysis tools and end users do not need to be troubled to know where the compute power for those come from.

Gourley: How soon will marketplace be made available to the community within C2S?  High and low side?

Wolfe: We plan on continuing to enhance our ability to deliver apps and the use of a marketplace in C2S will help us do just that. We will have enhanced marketplace functionality for users throughout the community by late 2015 and have plans to continue the improvement from there. Users will be able to access and interact with a high-side version of the marketplace that lets them select the apps to run in service to their mission needs and work requirements. The technology teams that keep apps running will have benefits now expected in enterprise grade service delivery organizations.

Gourley: How do small technology firms introduce their capability to your team if they believe they have a capability to benefit the IC?  How easy is it to port over now?

Wolfe: Any technical team that can build to the AWS model, which really means anyone from a single developer to a large systems integrator, can build to the integration guidelines of the AWS platform. If a solution is developed and tested on the AWS marketplace it will run in C2S. So porting over is easy. But the most critical question for any firm to consider when seeking to introduce a capability to C2S is to know what intelligence community challenge it addresses.

Gourley: Can you share any lessons learned with the community regarding data provenance in your C2S environment?

Wolfe: The ability to know the history of a given piece of data is important to our way of work, where analysts must know with confidence where data came from and who may have touched it. Data provenance is also important to ensuring compliance with oversight requirements. We have developed an expertise in architecting solutions with advanced data provenance leveraging C2S and the Apache Hadoop framework and are happy to share this expertise with others in the community.

Which raises another point: As we develop lessons in areas of data provenance and other advances in cloud computing we are continually looking to share those lessons, both inside the intelligence community and back into the technology ecosystem that has provided us so many great capabilities in service to our mission. You can expect lessons from us in data provenance and many other advanced cloud computing constructs to be made available for the benefit of others.

Gourley: CIA Director Brennan recently announced a major reorganization of the agency and a shift to execution of many key duties through mission centers. Has your work in C2S provided you with new capabilities relevant to this new organization?

Wolfe: Technology is here to serve the critically important missions of the agency and it is my job to ensure it is ready to serve no matter what the missions, functions and organization are. The organizational changes introduced by Director Brennan on 6 March 2015 are the result of lots of hard work and strategic thought by officers across the agency, and I’m proud to say the announced changes were informed by a knowledge that IT will support these critical changes. C2S is one of the ways we will execute on our requirements to support. It has become a foundation for accelerating the integration of digital capabilities across many agency organizations and that is a key goal of the announced reorganization.

Research Library

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Haystax Technology (@HaystaxTech) Names Advisory Board Members (including @BobGourley and @BobFlores)

Editor’s note: I’m very proud to be serving on the Haystax Technology advisory board. This firm is absolutely one to watch. For more see Haystax – bg

Haystax Technology Names Advisory Board Members

Six Advisors with Defense, Intelligence and Commercial Experience to Deliver Strategic Guidance to Haystax

McLean, VA – January 14, 2014 – Haystax Technology, Inc. today announced its strategic advisory board members. The members include top executives from AEG Worldwide and Lockheed Martin Corp., and high-ranking former officials from government organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and National Security Agency (NSA).

“Our goal is to create a world-class advisory board that provides unparalleled strategic guidance for Haystax,” said Haystax Technology CEO William Van Vleet III. “The panel delivers expertise and leadership in the defense, intelligence, military and commercial arenas that will enable Haystax to gain insights into its customer base and fine-tune product and service offerings. Haystax is honored and pleased to have our advisors join our integrated team, and we are looking forward to their counsel and contributions.”

The new advisory board members include:

• Matt Bettenhausen, Vice President and Chief Security Officer (CSO) for AEG Worldwide. Bettenhausen has overall responsibility for security, public safety and preparedness for the domestic and global operations and facilities of AEG, a leading sports and entertainment presenter. AEG that is affiliated with more than 100 of the world’s preeminent facilities, including the STAPLES Center (Los Angeles), Sprint Center (Kansas City, Mo.), Best Buy Theater (New York City), and the Target Center (Minneapolis). Previously, Bettenhausen served as director of the California Office of Homeland Security and Homeland Security Advisor to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, where he was responsible for developing and implementing a statewide strategy to prevent terrorism and prepare for all potential hazards facing California. He has held a number of senior leadership positions with national and state organizations, such as the chair of both the National Homeland Security Consortium and National Governors Association’s Homeland Security Advisors Council, as well as vice president of the National Emergency Managers Association.

• Bob Flores, Founder and President, Applicology Incorporated. Prior to starting Applicology, an independent consulting firm specializing in informatics and cyber security issues, Flores spent 31 years at the CIA where he held various positions in the Directorate of Intelligence, Directorate of Support, the National Clandestine Service and the Office of the CIO. He also was a representative on several government-wide information sharing committees and councils; and was assigned line and staff management roles in applications programming, training and education, contract and program management. He completed his career as the CIA’s CTO, where he was responsible for ensuring that the agency’s technology investments matched the needs of its mission.

•Crucial Point CTO Bob Gourley  Founder and CTO, Crucial Point LLC. Gourley founded Crucial Point, a technology research and advisory firm providing fact-based technology reviews in support of governments, venture capital, private equity and emerging technology firms. He also serves as editor of CTOvision.com, an award-winning technology blog. As a former CTO for the Department of Defense Intelligence Information System (DoDIIS), Gourley was responsible for establishing and overseeing enterprise wide technology decision-making processes. He provided technical and operational advice and senior technical review regarding DIA and DoDIIS information architectures, data processing, IT systems, applications, networks and communications. He served as the CTO for the DIA, leading its strategic engagements with industry, venture capital and academia. He is a board member for a number of industry and government organizations and is a participant in the National Security Agency Advisory Board (NSAAB) Emerging Technologies Panel.

• Peter Marino, former President and COO, Lockheed Electronics Co. Inc. and Fairchild Industries Inc. Marino has extensive experience in both government and private industry. In the government he held a number of senior positions over nearly 20 years with the CIA. Upon leaving the government he served as president and COO of both Lockheed and Fairchild; senior vice president of E-Systems, Inc.; CEO and president of Fire Arms Training Systems; and senior advisor at Morgan Stanley. Marino serves on 7 corporate boards and chairs 3 of them, including as an advisor for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, DHS, Department of Defense (DoD), CIA, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Reconnaissance Office and the CIA’s Senior Advisory Group. He is on the Defense Science Board on ISR, is a principal of The Center for Excellence in Government, chaired The Congressional Commission on the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and is a senior executive Fellow at Harvard University.

• Lieutenant General (RET) Richard Zahner, former Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Department of the Army. LTG(R) Zahner is a retired military intelligence professional with service in a number of senior Defense, Joint and Army leadership positions over a thirty-six year career. His last assignments included Director, Signals Intelligence for the National Security Agency; Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Joint and Coalition Warfighting Support) and Director, ISR Task Force for the Office of the Secretary of Defense; and the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. LTG Zahner is a member of a number of boards, including the Technology Directorate Panel of a major element of the intelligence community Advisory Board.

About Haystax
Haystax Technology, Inc. provides next-generation products, systems and service solutions to sift, refine and analyze large, disparate and unstructured volumes of data to reveal undiscovered connections and enable precise, actionable intelligence for government and commercial market clients. In essence, these technologies allow users to find “the needle in the haystack” quickly and reliably. For further information about Haystax Technology, visit www.haystax.com

Media Contact:
Laura Taylor
202-271-8216
laura@gaiapr.com

###

Sudo Apt-Get Install Army: Should Army Analyst Have The Power To Mod Their Analytical Tools?

ELEC_Army_Computer_Simulation_lgArmy officers and writers Crispin Burke, Niel Smith, and James King have a fascinating piece on the DCGS-A (Distributed Common Ground System-Army) contretemps. It rightly goes beyond blame and finger-pointing. Let me lay my own bias out front — Palantir is a fantastic company, there also many amazing and hard-working military tech people, and Rep. Duncan Hunter’s frustrations are also (as Burke et al explains) understandable. I see no villains here.

There are systemic reasons for why Army users struggle with Army systems: lack of interoperability/commonality, and the overall mismatch between Army IT development practices and the Valley way. It’s a great piece, and I encourage readers to mosey over to Small Wars Journal to see how endless hours of Burke complaining about AKO (the reflector belt of Army IT) finally became productive.

In particular, I would like to highlight one Burke-Smith-King bullet of interest:

Code the software using open concepts, and design the software for user modding.   Army software is often locked into proprietary specifications of the vendors.  However, the commercial software and gaming industry often encourages add-ins and “mods” to their software that enhance the user experience.  In many cases, these mods are incorporated into later versions of the programs.  The Army should leverage the ingenuity of its tech-savvy soldiers to constantly improve and refine the systems they operate.

A major part of DCGSC-A is now open source. But I’d like to expand a bit on the quoted bullet.

One of the major problems the Army users quoted in this somewhat inflammatory The New Republic article talk about is their difficulty fitting components of DCGS-A to user requirements. Though much of this has to do with the more generalized problems Burke and others talk about, one could also plausibly see problems that issue from unique operational requirements.

Tom Ricks famously said that different geographical regions of Iraq felt like entirely separate wars. In Afghanistan, then-Major General Michael T. Flynn wrote about the need for atmospheric and specific intelligence on local conditions. No one software program has everything or can do everything well, and the military and intelligence community that is increasingly asked to do (in breadth and depth) more than ever. So what to do?

In the computational social science community, we deal with this issue by generating new packages that serve a local and specific need. I use the programming language Python for my coursework, and Python has an active user community that contributes, standardizes, and validates packages. If I want to do something with statistical algorithms, I import the pandas package into my interpreter. If I want to use network analysis, I import networkx (a package that former intelligence analyst and current private sector data scientist Drew Conway has said stands up to some of the best social network software in the defense community). You can do statistics without pandas, but your own improvisational solution might not be as good as something as tested and popular as the pandas package.

It is because of this flexibility and tight user community that the statistical programming language R is quickly threatening closed-source industry leaders in popularity among all manner of data science career areas. In my own whimsy as an academic egghead PhD student, I wondered–following Burke’s modding suggestion–if something close to my own experience with Python could be replicated. Operating in a particularly rough part of the world and your mission software needs some extra functionality? An package could be designed to solve the particular problem.

Most importantly open-source programming languages and software can at least theoretically interface with the proprietary products often used in the federal space. The software giant ESRI has built a Python interface  for its popular ArcGIS geographic information system program. And one can also use open-source software in development environments that go easy on users without much programming experience. Though I personally prefer the Spyder Python development environment and iPython Notebook, some of my classmates use Enthought’s proprietary Canopy development environment. I am a little (though not by much) more used to importing packages from the command line and navigating repositories. So I feel more comfortable installing my necessary packages from my Linux virtual machine’s terminal, not Canopy’s easy-to-use package manager.

I don’t know if it would be possible to replicate the freewheeling community of users seen in the open-source community within the military. In fact, when I posed this question to a group of military IT insiders in a email chain, they (rightly) told me that it was fantastic a vision as the Iraq and Afghan war strategies. There were many trenchant observations, many of which focusing on uneven/outdated IT knowledge. But two in particular struck me as particularly telling.

Even though Python has a “benevolent dictator for life” it also depends on a vast, freewheeling community of users. A closed-source version of Github would not benefit from this, and thus there would be less advantage for a soldier or intelligence community analyst to work on their own time (unless specifically incentivized by their boss) to develop, say, a Helmand or Nuristan package. Even if we could get something like that, the security requirements, organizational stovepiping, and bureaucratic politics that characterizes the military-industrial complex might act as a limiting factor on the size and viability of a military modding community.

Lastly, software is iteratively improved in the open-source due to a large group of people attacking bugs and improving on the original design. Without a sufficiently large and diverse community, a military/intelligence community mod group would not really be as effective. And if I download a package that hasn’t been sufficiently worked over, the worst that might happen is that my class model would run more slowly or output spurious results. A military package that doesn’t work correctly could have much more serious consequences.

That said, I don’t think the vision I lay out is completely improbable. The aforementioned networkx package was developed by the government-run Los Alamos National Laboratory, demonstrating that a federal ecosystem could also be a player in open-source development (little known fact: TOR also grew out of a federal project). And the community of practice fostered by Small Wars Journal, Disruptive Thinkers (and its DEF spinoff), the Warlord Loop, CompanyCommander, and other informal groups suggests precedent for some precedent for a military/IC modding-like system. As a civilian on the outside, I would also be curious to see what the intelligence community’s experience with similar forums on closed networks like Intelink, SIPR, JWICS, or the Open Source Center have been (for example, the much-heralded Intellipedia).

Burke, Smith, and King are bright young officers, and I hope their crusade for better Army IT meets with success. And even if an military officer  or government civilian probably won’t be able to just type my Ubuntu terminal command and get a package from a repository, the vision of modding Burke and his friends suggest would help IT be more responsive to government and military needs. That said, I can reliably predict that AKO will torment Burke even after he eventually leaves the Army. :)

For more on this topic see our reporting on National Security and Technology

 

DSB Report on Resilient Military Systems and the Cyber Threat

Bottom Line Up Front: After reviewing all available evidence and rigorously weighing threat information, a Task Force of the Defense Science Board (DSB) concludes that:

The United States cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent. 

How does that make you feel? You know yourself what adversaries are doing when it comes to intellectual property theft. Now read on for more about what the DSB sees as the threat to military systems.

Here are more details: 

The Defense Science Board (DSB) provides advice, assessments and reports as chartered by DoD leadership. It has studied cyber security and related topics for years and has been instrumental in providing new ideas and perspectives for action by DoD leadership.

The DSB was recently chartered to look at an interesting and somewhat intellectually stimulating topic, that of how US military systems could withstand cyber attack and remain able to execute their mission.  The chartered group, a task force on Resilient Military Systems, produced a report with a set of recommendations designed to improve DoD’s ability to accomplish its missions. The overarching strategy recommended by the DSB is one that enhanced the department’s defenses in the face of attacks, decreases the effectiveness of adversaries, increases the cost to adversaries, and deters the most significant adversaries by ensuring the US maintains the ability to deliver desired mission capabilities in the face of catastrophic cyber attack.

The task force also identified a framework to implement metrics collection systems and then develop appropriate performance metrics that can be used to shape DoD’s investment decisions. The report approved by DSB chairman Paul Kaminsky is at DSB Report

Here is more from the forwarding letter to the report:

The final report of the DSB Task Force on Resilient Military Systems is attached. This report is based on the perspective of 24 Task Force members who received more than 50 briefings from practitioners and senior officials throughout the Department of Defense (DoD), Intelligence Community (IC), commercial sector, academia, national laboratories, and policymakers. This Task Force was asked to review and make recommendations to improve the resilience of DoD systems to cyber attacks, and to develop a set of metrics that the Department could use to track progress and shape investment priorities.

After conducting an 18-month study, this Task Force concluded that the cyber threat is serious and that the United States cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent utilizing cyber capabilities in combination with all of their military and intelligence capabilities (a “full spectrum” adversary). While this is also true for others (e.g. Allies, rivals, and public/private networks), this Task Force strongly believes the DoD needs to take the lead and build an effective response to measurably increase confidence in the IT systems we depend on (public and private) and at the same time decrease a would-be attacker’s confidence in the effectiveness of their capabilities to compromise DoD systems. This conclusion was developed upon several factors, including the success adversaries have had penetrating our networks; the relative ease that our Red Teams have in disrupting, or completely beating, our forces in exercises using exploits available on the Internet; and the weak cyber hygiene position of DoD networks and systems. The Task Force believes that the recommendations of this report create the basis for a strategy to address this broad and pervasive threat.

Nearly every conceivable component within DoD is networked. These networked systems and components are inextricably linked to the Department’s ability to project military force and the associated mission assurance. Yet, DoD’s networks are built on inherently insecure architectures that are composed of, and increasingly using, foreign parts. While DoD takes great care to secure the use and operation of the “hardware” of its weapon systems, the same level of resource and attention is not spent on the complex network of information technology (IT) systems that are used to support and operate those weapons or critical IT capabilities embedded within them.

DoD’s dependence on this vulnerable technology is a magnet to U.S. opponents. In fact, DoD and its contractor base have already sustained staggering losses of system design information incorporating decades of combat knowledge and experience that provide adversaries insight to technical designs and system use. Despite numerous DoD actions, efforts are fragmented, and the Department is not currently prepared to mitigate the threat.

That forwarding letter was signed by the task force co-chairs, Mr. Lewis Von Thaer and Mr. James R. Gosler, two of the most professional, well thought out leaders I have ever worked with.

Please dive deep into the full document now. You will find some information you already know, but I promise some surprises as well.

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Cyber War

SciFi

Super Bowl Ads Indicate Big Businesses Think You Are Afraid of AI

Tom Loftus provided an insightful review of some of Super Bowl ads in the 4 Feb 2019 Wall Street Journal. Like AI parody in SNL, these ads really poked fun at computers: Seriously, did anyone catch the commercials? If the Super Bowl is the zeitgeist, then it is safe to say that America is not […]

HBO’s Westworld: The Man In Black is a special kind of Twitter user

HBO’s Westworld is a modern take on the Michael Crichton SciFi tale of a robotic amusement park. The HBO version has a new twist. The creators/writers were all exposed to years of Twitter, which has influenced every episode and the entire arch of two seasons of the show. Now that season two is wrapping up, […]