Tag: PENTAGON

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, ...

Yesterday, Wikileaks published its long awaited 'Iraq War Logs,' a collection of nearly 400,000 classified military documents covering the controversial war in Iraq. According to the Guardian, the logs consist of verified first-hand accounts from coalition soldiers on the ground, and give a chilling "glimpse into the secret history of the war that the United States government has been privy to ...

Highlights from this morning's other big tech headlines.... With help from former hacker Adrian Lamo, authorities recently nabbed the man responsible for divulging an inordinate amount of classified videos, documents and communications to whistleblower site Wikileaks. Now, federal officials just need to keep the site from publishing its supposed supply of 230,000 military and government ...

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 ...

Within "a couple of years" Dr. Geoffrey Ginsburg, director of Duke's Institute for Genome Science and Policy, believes that suitcase-sized devices capable of detecting disease long before a person shows any symptoms will be arriving on battlefields across the globe. The project, funded with money from the Pentagon, may prove to be a major advancement off the battlefield as well. Instead of ...

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 ...

Share In an effort to provide a faster turnaround, the U.S. Army could replace some human intelligence officers in war zones with a complex system of computers. According to Wired, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, or the freaky arm of the US Military) is hosting a workshop for a new project dubbed Graph Understanding and Analysis for Rapid Detection - Deployed on the ...

What better way to fight the dangers of biological warfare than with... biological warfare? As Wired's Danger Room reports, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is set on investing a full $6 million in a project called "BioDesign," an ambitious plan that, if successful, would spawn a whole army of genetically engineered organisms programmed to fight the good fight -- until the end of ...

Despite its wares being billed as "non-lethal," we'd rather not find ourselves on the business end of a product from Taser International, which designs weapons that use a strong dose of electricity to incapacitate people. After learning about the company's latest venture, we don't think we'll change our minds any time soon, either. According to New Scientist, Taser is set to deliver prototypes of ...

After years of issuing social media policies that have been about as clear as mud, the U.S. military is nearing the completion of a new policy that would give troops the go ahead to use sites like Twitter or Facebook, Wired reports. A draft of the policy is circulating around the Pentagon, and if it's approved, troops will be allowed to use Department of Defense networks to access social ...

At any given moment, there are dozens of advanced GPS satellites orbiting the Earth. These satellites help with everything from missile launches and aircraft flight paths to automated teller machines. In a way, it is frightening to think the world depends so much on these complicated devices and their functioning correctly. Now, it looks like paranoia may pay off. According to a report from The ...

The White House is preparing to create a new office that would coordinate cyber defense and offense, the New York Times reported yesterday. The new office would report to both the National Security Council and the National Economic Council and would manage a multi-billion dollar effort to safeguard governmental computer networks from attack. In addition to protecting government equipment, the ...

According to a front page Wall Street Journal article this morning, it looks like piles of data related to the $300 billion F-35 Joint Strike Fighter military plane have found their way in to the hands of hackers. According to government officials the newspaper spoke with, the Defense Department was the subject of a concerted cyber attack over the past few months in which terabytes (yes plural) ...

Traditionally, modern warfare has been thought about in terms of bombs and bullets. Ladies and gentlemen, that is an antiquated concept of international conflict. According to CBS News, the Pentagon has spent over $100 million in the last six months defending the United States against repeated attacks on the Pentagon and military bases around the country. You don't often hear about these ...

While plenty of gamers have heaped praise on Blizzard's seminal massively-multiplayer online game 'World of Warcraft' (WoW), many more have had nothing good to say about the thing, such as those who have lost spouses, friends, or family members to the clutches of the game's addictive ways. The Pentagon, however, has something rather different to say about the game. It thinks that it could be a ...