Cyberwar, Cadets Trade the Trenches for Firewalls

New York Times ^ | May 11 2009 | COREY KILGANNON and NOAM COHEN

[Republican Party Reptile]

WEST POINT, N.Y. — The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken.

Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”

These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The N.S.A. made the cadets’ task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world.

The competition was a final exam of sorts for a senior elective class. The cadets, who were computer science and information technology majors, competed against teams from the Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and Merchant Marine as well as the Naval Postgraduate Academy and the Air Force Institute of Technology. Each team was judged on how well it subdued the threats from the N.S.A.

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, .continue with excerpt at link

[MattinNJ]

Fascinating article-thanks.

[KarlInOhio]

Can the Air Force team use an active response method? A couple 1000 pound GPS bombs dropped on the NSA HQ might pause the hacking attack.

[Republican Party Reptile]

LOL, good one ...

[Waverunner]

NSA would make the hacks look like they were coming from a certain school in Colorado Springs.

[grayhog]

Wow! An article in the NY Times on West Point that doesn’t characterize the place as a home for crazed ultra-right wing warmongers. I was trying to figure out how this made it past the filters until I noticed the article was in the Technology section. The regular “news” editors must have missed this one. Maybe its all the budget cuts at the Times, or maybe all those mandatory NY Times subscriptions at West Point finally amounted to something.