Tag: CYBERWARFARE

Despite improvements made in recent years, the U.S. is still highly vulnerable to cyber-attacks, the head of the military's cyber-forces warned yesterday. "To put it bluntly, we are very thin, and a crisis would quickly stress our cyber forces," General Keith Alexander told the House Armed Services Committee. Alexander noted that the Pentagon is working on building up its network defenses, ...

U.S. security officials are asking that the rhetoric surrounding the potential for "cyber-war" be tempered in favor of a rational discussion on how to distinguish an actual cyber-war between nations from cyber-attacks that use war-like tactics. It's a blurry line, but White House cyber-security czar Howard Schmidt, who spoke at the RSA computer security conference in San Fransisco, said using the ...

Somewhere between the comforting notion that liberty is protected and the terrifying fact that information technology operates entirely out of our hands lies this interesting little factoid: The U.S. has the capability to reconnect the Internet in foreign countries. When the switch goes off in countries like Egypt, the United States military can remotely trigger satellites or send planes that ...

The small post-Soviet nation of Estonia has created a bit of a paradigm for cyber-security: an elite, all-voluntary force of private and public sector tech pros, from programmers to administrators to top army officials. It's kind of like a cyber-Justice League. Before this starts to sound like a tale of vigilante justice, some history: in 2007, after Estonia made a decision to move a Russian ...

Officials in Iran have confirmed that the Stuxnet super worm has infected personal computers at one of the country's nuclear power plants, just a few days after cyber-security experts warned the public that the malware might be targeting Tehran's nuclear facilities. Mahmoud Jafari, who leads Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant, told the IRNA news agency that authorities at the plant are currently trying ...

An awe-inspiringly complex piece of malware named 'Stuxnet' has some security experts openly wondering whether or not it's the most sophisticated worm ever to hit the planet. Others are speculating that it may be used to target a nuclear plant in Iran. Although the worm originally popped up in June, when it attacked Windows PCs operating industrial control systems, cyber experts are only now ...

Maybe you heard about DARPA's (the creepy research arm of the government) secret, fake version of the Internet? It's been reported here and there, but, you know, those covert programs have a tendency to get swept under the rug. It was two years ago that DARPA received a directive from the White House and the Pentagon, as part of a $17 billion effort to strengthen national security, to build a ...

For the first time in U.S. history, the Pentagon has appointed a general to oversee the country's cyberwarfare operations. According to the Guardian, four-star general Keith Alexander was appointed Friday to head up the Cyber Command unit. The unit's job is to orchestrate virtual military operations across worldwide computer networks. In other words, Alexander will work to protect U.S. computer ...

The U.S. government has recently made protecting its computers against cyber-attacks a top priority. Now, according to an Associated Press report, the U.S. Air Force will incorporate basics of cyberwarfare into its training regimen for new recruits. In addition, beginning in June, the Air Force will offer a cyberwarfare undergraduate-level training program for officers. Four-star General Robert ...

When you think of cyber warfare, you probably picture highly trained hackers, sitting in the dark corners of military bases, surrounded by monitors, infiltrating the systems of rogue governments. The Navy, on the other hand, imagines a world where cyber weapons don't behave much differently from traditional ones. According to Military.com, the seafaring branch of our armed services is looking ...

Cybercrime spans the entire globe, and, until now, there's been little collaboration between nations when it comes to combating international networks of hackers. The Wall Street Journal reports on the newly formed European Electronic Crime Task Force -- a Rome-headquartered effort between the United States and the European Union. The group is backed by the muscle of the U.S. Secret Service, an ...

Warfare is becoming increasingly sophisticated and cyber attacks are becoming commonplace. The recent Russian attack on Georgia is such an example -- the ground invasion of Georgia was preceded by an Internet attack that crippled many of the country's governmental and financial sites and institutions. Security experts fear that the U.S. may be vulnerable to such an attack, especially since we ...

The conflict with the former Soviet state of Georgia continues to rumble with Russian forces still on the offensive. But,in this modern conflict, Georgia is also claiming Russian assaults on a very different battlefield: cyberspace. Georgian officials are accusing Russian forces of engaging in attacks against official sites, like that of the Georgian Ministry of Defense, which was knocked ...

"Cyberwarfare" has become a greater and greater problem, with hackers around the globe preying on unprotected (or lightly protected) corporate or government networks. The U.S. Air Force is taking the lead among our armed forces when it comes to combating the threat. First it was with the appointment of Lt. General Robert Elder Jr. to lead the Air Force Cyber Command, and now it's expanded training ...

By the sounds of our headline, you might think that the U.S. Air Force is extending an olive branch to those workers made of silicon and steel (a.k.a. robots) by promoting its first cyborg general. The truth, however, is slightly less exciting. Lt. Gen. Robert Elder Jr., the new Cyber General, is flesh and blood like the rest of us, and earns that sinister-sounding title by taking command of the ...