Dr. Stephen Blank, one of America's top experts on Russia and the former satellites of the USSR, likens US Intelligence to a clipping service, a very bad one. He itemizes the recent failures of US Intelligence and observes that anyone in the audience he was addressing in NYC could have written a better threat estimate than that presented by the Director of National Intelligence recently to Congress. Includes video of his full answer to the question about US Intelligence.
By the end of the attack, Barr's iPad was reputedly erased, his LinkedIn and Twitter accounts were hijacked, the HBGary Federal website was defaced, proprietary HBGary source code was stolen and with over 71,000 private emails now published to the internet, HBGary was laid bare.
In this, was our first lesson: The asymmetry of cyber warfare.
Interesting, and if the point about Garmin is true, what is the relationship between them and the Air Force? The Air Force has gotten into a lot of areas that include tracking to the individual level (RFI) under the guise of tracking logistics….
Following a navigation system's instructions without driving into a ravine is hard enough as it is — can you even imagine how hard it'd be if you kept losing GPS reception every time you drove within range of an LTE tower? There have been a few anecdotal concerns raised over the last several weeks that LightSquared's proposed LTE network — which would repurpose L-band spectrum formerly used for satellite — is too close to the spectrum used by the Global Positioning System, leading to unintentional jamming when the towers overpower the much weaker GPS signals. Things have gotten a little more interesting, though, now that the US Air Force Space Command has officially piped in. General William Shelton has gone on record saying that “a leading GPS receiver manufacturer just … has concluded that within 3 to 5 miles on the ground and within about 12 miles in the air GPS is jammed by those towers,” calling the situation “unbelievable” and saying he's “hopeful the FCC does the right thing.”
Phi Beta Iota: Electromagnetic conflicts have been a known issue since the 1980's. The Soviets had emission control standards ten times tougher than the US, which had (and continues to have) virtually no standards at all. This is one reason why US forces in Afghanistan are so severely hampered, with drones, aircraft, radars, and various other “systems” all interfering with one another. Elsewhere, notably in England, modern cars come to a complete stop within a couple of kilometers of certain Royal Air Force emitting stations. All of this can be attributed to at least four root problems:
1. An acquisition archipelago (nothing sytematic about it) so stupid and out of control as to defy belief. No standards, no brains, no integrity.
2. Service-centric and mission-centric “preferred contractor” and “proprietary single point solutions” standard operating processes that are deliberately not orchestrated with other services, civilian elements of the government, or other nations.
3. A lack of integrity among senior officers who should know better.
4. A lack of integrity in Congress, where the focus is on collecting the 5% kick-back from delivered programs, not on actually serving the public interest by insuring affordability, interoperability, sustainability, and utility.
Change is sweeping though the Middle East and it's the Facebook generation that has kickstarted it
Guardian, 29 January 2011
EXTRACT: Meanwhile, the uprisings are curing the Arab world of an opiate, the obsession with Israel. For years, successive Arab dictators have tried to keep discontent at bay by distracting people with the Israeli-Arab conflict. Israel's bombardment of Gaza in 2009 increased global sympathy for Palestinians. Mubarak faced the issue of both guarding the border of Gaza, helping Israel enforce its siege, and continuing to use the conflict as a distraction. Enough with dictators hijacking sympathy for Palestinians and enough with putting our lives on hold for that conflict.
Phi Beta Iota: The Assisi Peace Summit would do well to integrate the Facebook Generation. Ms. Eltahawy raises the prospect of Arab youth no longer tolerating an Arab-Israeli conflict (as well as genocide by both Israel and the Arab dictators against the Palestinians). The question now for us is this: where is the Jewish Facebook Generation? They need to pay attention and participate. By the by, this is what Advanced Cyber/Information Operations should be focusing on, not the expensive and fraudulent cyber-terror/cyber-security now a cancer within Cyber-Command circles.
Everybody is putting out their Top 10 lists of predictions for 2011. Not to be left out of the party, below is a list of what we expect to see in 2011 in Cyber Security.
1. Malware.
2. Blame the User.
3. Reactive approaches to security will continue to fail.
4. Major Breaches in Sectors with Intellectual Property.
5. Hacktivists will bask in their new-found glory.
Phi Beta Iota: Nothing wrong with any of the above, except that they are out of context. As the still-valid cyber-threat slide created by Mitch Kabay in the 1990's shows, 70% of our losses have nothing to do with disgruntled or dishonest insiders, or external attacks including viruses. Cyber has not been defined, in part because the Human Intelligence crowd does not compute circuits, and the circuit crowd do not computer human intelligence. We are at the very beginning of a startling renaissance in cyber/Information Operations (IO) in which–we predict–existing and near-term hardware and software vulnerabilities will be less than 30% of the problem. Getting analog Cold War leaders into new mind-sets, and educating all hands toward sharing rather than hoarding, toward multinational rather than unilateral, will be key aspects of our progress. Cyber is life, life is cyber–it's all connected. Stove-piped “solutions” make it worse.
Information has never been so free. Even in authoritarian countries information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable. — US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, January 21, 2010
It’s too late to stop WikiLeaks from publishing thousands more classified documents, nabbed from the Pentagon’s secret network. But the U.S. military is telling its troops to stop using CDs, DVDs, thumb drives and every other form of removable media — or risk a court martial.
Maj. Gen. Richard Webber, commander of Air Force Network Operations, issued the Dec. 3 “Cyber Control Order” — obtained by Danger Room — which directs airmen to “immediately cease use of removable media on all systems, servers, and stand alone machines residing on SIPRNET,” the Defense Department’s secret network. Similar directives have gone out to the military’s other branches.
