[Infowarrior] - General Tells Crowd How US Hacked Enemy In Afghanistan

[Richard Forno]

One wonders exactly how much of Gen Mills' comments are effects-inflation as part of DOD's continual cyber-chest-thumping these days.  Or perhaps a feeble attempt at psyop?   And further still, given the targets / environment in question, one has to wonder exactly how sophisticated of a "cyber attack" this was against Tango Joe to begin with.     --rick


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http://www.khou.com/news/world/167334595.html

August 25, 2012 

General Tells Crowd How US Hacked Enemy In Afghanistan

By Raphael Satter, Associated Press

The U.S. military has been launching cyberattacks against its opponents in
Afghanistan, a senior officer says, making an unusually explicit
acknowledgment of the oft-hidden world of electronic warfare.

Marine Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills' comments came last week at a conference in
Baltimore during which he explained how U.S. commanders considered cyber
weapons an important part of their arsenal.

"I can tell you that as a commander in Afghanistan in the year 2010, I was
able to use my cyber operations against my adversary with great impact,"
Mills said. "I was able to get inside his nets, infect his
command-and-control, and in fact defend myself against his almost constant
incursions to get inside my wire, to affect my operations."

Mills, now a deputy commandant with the Marine Corps, was in charge of
international forces in southwestern Afghanistan between 2010 and 2011,
according to his official biography. He didn't go into any further detail as
to the nature or scope of his forces' attacks, but experts said that such a
public admission that they were being carried out was itself striking.

"This is news," said James Lewis, a cyber-security analyst with the
Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said
that while it was generally known in defense circles that cyberattacks had
been carried out by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he had never seen a senior
officer take credit for them in such a way.

"It's not secret," Lewis said in a telephone interview, but he added: "I
haven't seen as explicit a statement on this as the one" Mills made.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment on
Mills' speech.

U.S. defense planners have spent the past few years wondering aloud about
how and under what circumstances the Pentagon would launch a cyberattack
against its enemies, but it's only recently become apparent that a
sophisticated program of U.S.-backed cyberattacks is already under way.

A book by The New York Times reporter David Sanger recently recounted how
President Barack Obama ordered a wave of electronic incursions aimed at
physically sabotaging Iran's disputed atomic energy program. Subsequent
reports have linked the program to a virus dubbed Flame, which prompted a
temporary Internet blackout across Iran's oil industry in April, and another
virus called Gauss, which appeared to have been aimed at stealing
information from customers of Lebanese banks. An earlier report alleged that
U.S. forces in Iraq had hacked into a terrorist group's computer there to
lure its members into an ambush.

Herbert Lin, a cyber expert at the National Research Council, agreed that
Mills' comments were unusual in terms of the fact that they were made
publicly. But Lin said that the United States was, little by little, opening
up about the fact that its military was launching attacks across the
Internet.

"The U.S. military is starting to talk more and more in terms of what it's
doing and how it's doing it," he said. "A couple of years ago it was hard to
get them to acknowledge that they were doing offense at all - even as a
matter of policy, let alone in specific theaters or specific operations."

Mills' brief comments about cyberattacks in Afghanistan were delivered to
the TechNet Land Forces East conference in Baltimore on Aug. 15, but they
did not appear to have attracted much attention at the time. Footage of the
speech was only recently posted to the Internet by conference organizers.

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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.