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In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

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Re: In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

#61

Post by lsc »

socceroos wrote: post #58
phaus wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I mean no disrespect to the soldiery, but why use soldiers for this, and not the DIA/NSA/CIA/various other TLAs? I specifically said that I wasn't advocating this as a military mission. I was just stating that if it was a military mission, the Soldiers themselves wouldn't be the reason that it fails. >Grunts wearing camouflage sitting in front of a laptop trying to outbrain someone seems humorously perverse. A grunt…

I guarantee you will not attract the best talent if your vision includes them wearing camouflage.

There are lots of downsides to the military as an employer. The dresscode is pretty far down that list.

The biggest downside, I think? As a civilian, it is my right to walk off a job at any time. Sure, there are expectations that I'll give you some notice (and I will) but worst comes to worst? I can always walk, and the worst my employer can do is call me bad names.

In the military, those contracts? they mean something. Yeah, you can ask to be transferred around; hell, I know someone who was able to actually quit the navy half way through basic, but it was a big fucking deal.

I mean, there are advantages to the military, too. I'm not saying it's a bad choice for everyone. I'm just saying that wearing dorky pants doesn't even make the list.

The military, like most government jobs, makes a lot of sense for someone who values stability. There are plenty of skilled people that value stability over the ability to leave; I'm just not one of them.

Re: In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

#63

Post by shubb »

phaus wrote: post #29
rdtsc wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't, hell I don't even have access to some of the basic tools I need (i.e. version control) Yap. Dealing with the military as a customer I have definitely have seen red tape that goes beyond reasonable for security and actually downright counter-productive (the steps needed to jump through to "secure" a box, many are wasteful, antiquated, yet some obvious ones are not mentioned. There are things like "tcpdump…

>I'll just use a python wrapper around libpcap then. Must be nice, last government SOC I worked in, we could only script with powershell 1.0 installed. Sadly, that was just a year ago. We had tcpdump and Wireshark, but we weren't allowed to capture anything with it.

'They have tools to listen to network traffic. But we told them not to. It's fine.'

'So... if they don't intercept network traffic, they were trustworthy and it wouldn't matter. But if they are not trustworthy... they can still sniff the traffic? Are you sure it's fine?'

'Yeah, every modern network is switched so there is nothing to sniff'

Re: In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

#64

Post by walshemj »

s_q_b wrote: post #15
mullingitover wrote: post #4

If we're trying to use uniformed military troops to hack servers remotely, we deserve to lose any 'cyber war.' They should be used to gain physical access to hardware and people, for the purpose of applying the xkcd decryption heuristic[1]. Leave the hacking to the experts. [1] http://xkcd.com/538/

Those guys exist. But there are a whole host of reasons you'd want a force that could attack an enemy country's infrastructure remotely. As a chief example, it's far less inflammatory than boots on the ground. Can you imagine the difference in reaction if we sent door-kickers on the ground to Natanz and smashed the Iranian centrifuges, rather than using Stuxnet? The problem here is that there is a fundamental tension…

nd for a lot of the sigint elements of cyber warfare almost all of the value is in not being detected.

Re: In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

#65

Post by walshemj »

mpyne wrote: post #27
otoburb wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If American reservists are expected to become a more critical component/dependency for US full-time cyberwarfare defensive or offensive capabilities, would this lead in any way to more time asked of reserve forces at least until internal military specialists are considered to be on par with their civilian and reservist counterparts? I'm curious if reservists deemed to have critical skills would be called upon to act…

> I'm curious if reservists deemed to have critical skills would be called upon to act beyond an amount comfortable for them, considering that they typically already have full-time day jobs as mentioned in the article. Yes, that is certainly possible. The whole "1 weekend a month, 2 week a year" thing died with the World Trade Center. While Reserve units certainly try to maximize flexibility to try from interfering w…

yes I know quite senior (RSM) people in the UK TA (reserves) who got sent to the gulf for an extended period - though that company does sponsor a TA unit so was fairly cool with it.

Re: In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

#66

Post by pjc50 »

thefreeman wrote: post #28
__john wrote: post #22

So I can off some first hand perspective here. >Do the military "cyberwarriors" even have local admin rights on their machines? We don't, hell I don't even have access to some of the basic tools I need (i.e. version control) >Hackers don't sign up for active duty military. They do, I've met the smartest people I know in the military . The hacker types never stay though they either get kicked out because they don't wa…

I don't understand how the military cannot afford to compete with the private sector. This is where wars will be won now (or soon). It's pretty important to defend ourselves. And we have trillions of dollars...

The military lost the war with the private sector some time ago, and that's why "defence" spending is in the trillions.

My comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009579 applies again. The 'cyberwar' does not matter, or at least not in a way that threatens the existing power structure. To the extent that there are duelling hackers out there, they're operating in the financial realm, which is very far from the military and extremely resistant to being told what to do.

Besides, conventional war is over between major powers. There's colonial policing, guerilla warfare, secret ops -- and then straight up to nuclear exchanges. NATO's eastern border is Poland; Russia's western border is some way east of Donetsk; in the middle is an ugly unacknowledged skirmish using Ukraine as a buffer zone. The skirmish will continue unescalated because neither side can afford to stop the gas pipelines flowing through Ukraine.

(The Russian missile launcher was tracked by, among other things, geotagged selfies on Instagram posted by one of the operators. Does that count as "cyberwar"?)

Re: In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

#69

Post by aestra »

otoburb wrote: post #16
ohashi wrote: post #3

This doesn't seem quite right. It says reservists. They may also have roles in civilian life, but they are also part of the Military. That seems a bit deceptive in the title.

If American reservists are expected to become a more critical component/dependency for US full-time cyberwarfare defensive or offensive capabilities, would this lead in any way to more time asked of reserve forces at least until internal military specialists are considered to be on par with their civilian and reservist counterparts? I'm curious if reservists deemed to have critical skills would be called upon to act…

What exactly is "amount comfortable to them?" I'm sure if you sign up for the reserves you're going to be ok to be called upon if needed? Since I think that's the whole point?

I know a reservist that got deployed for several months, so it isn't like it isn't heard of.

Re: In secret cyberwar game, reservist techies pummel miltary cyberwarriors

#70

Post by wisty »

mullingitover wrote: post #4

If we're trying to use uniformed military troops to hack servers remotely, we deserve to lose any 'cyber war.' They should be used to gain physical access to hardware and people, for the purpose of applying the xkcd decryption heuristic[1]. Leave the hacking to the experts. [1] http://xkcd.com/538/

There's at least one other well known agency that focuses on cyber security.

The uniformed forces might have hackers, sure. The Coast Guard has heavy machine guns, but the US doesn't rely on them for naval defence - it's also got a whole other force (the Navy) which can do the heavy lifting.

If the Army doesn't have hackers to win cyber wars, it has hackers because it's a huge organisation that needs internal cyber security expertise.

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