57th Information Aggressor Squadron to the Rescue
Back in February, I mentioned that before Russia physically invaded Georgia, they launched Internet-based attacks against the Georgian infrastructure. Well, it seems that I wasn’t the only one paying attention. Various United States military organizations—including the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, Merchant Marines, the Naval Postgraduate Academy, the Air Force Institute of Technology, and the National Security Agency—are training their members in cyber warfare.
After the jump, see more of the New York Times’ coverage.
The New York Times had this to say:
The cyberwar games at West Point are just one example of a heightened awareness across the military that it must treat the threat of a computer attack as seriously as it does an attack carried out by a bomber or combat brigade. There is hardly an American military unit or headquarters that has not been ordered to analyze the risk of cyberattacks to its mission — and to train to counter them. If the hackers were to succeed, they could change information on the network and cripple Internet communications.
In the desert outside Las Vegas, in a series of inconspicuous trailers, some of the most highly motivated hackers in the United States spend their days and nights probing the military’s vast computer networks for weaknesses to exploit.
These hackers — many of whom got their start as teenagers devoted to computer screens in their basements — have access to the latest in attack software. Some of it was developed by cryptologists at the N.S.A., the nation’s largest intelligence agency, where most of the government’s talent for breaking and making computer codes resides.
The hackers have an official name — the 57th Information Aggressor Squadron — and a real home, Nellis Air Force Base.