[ISN] DOD cyberwarriors in a war of attrition

[InfoSec News]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk at c4i.org>

http://www.fcw.com/article89526-07-11-05-Web

By Frank Tiboni
July 11, 2005 

Military officials can better protect their communications systems by 
building fake networks or Honeynets to divert adversaries away from 
critical systems and to gain intelligence on their attack methods, a 
top official in the Defense Department's cyberdefense organization 
suggests in a new paper. 

The new computer defense strategy is called Net Force Maneuver. "For 
Net Force Maneuver, our objective is to draw the adversaries away from 
real, mission-critical systems while learning as much about their 
attack techniques and capabilities as possible," said Army Col. Carl 
Hunt, director of technology and analysis/J-9 in the Joint Task Force 
for Global Network Operations (JTF-GNO), in the paper "Net Force 
Maneuver: A NetOps Construct."

To use Net Force Maneuver, military officials must better understand 
their networks, the technologies available to better operate them and 
their adversaries' capabilities, Hunt said. He co-wrote the paper with 
Doug Gardner, director of the Applied Technology Unit in JTF-GNO, and 
Jeffrey Bowes, technical director of the Joint Information Operations 
Division of Northrop Grumman's Information Technology TASC unit. The 
paper appeared in the 2005 Information Assurance Proceedings 
publication produced for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics 
Engineers Computer Society's Systems, Man and Cybernetics IA Workshop 
held in June at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, but was 
announced at the Army IT Conference in Las Vegas earlier that month.

Hunt also describes the military's current computer network defense 
strategy as a battle against attrition. "Unfortunately, attrition is a 
reasonable characterization of our defensive computer network strategy 
today, with one major caveat," he said. "With the exception of an 
occasional arrest, our adversaries are able to inflict a substantial 
amount of harassment and a measurable amount of damage upon DOD 
communications networks at practically no cost to themselves." 

Hunt went on to say, "It's probably only a slight exaggeration to say 
we are fighting an attrition battle where we are the only ones being 
attrited."


 
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"Communications without intelligence is noise;  Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
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