01 Jul 15. US Army Seeks Leap-Ahead Cyber Defense Tech. The US Army is seeking to equip its cyber warriors with cutting-edge networking hardware, and it is going outside the traditional acquisitions system to do it. The easily transportable “fly-away” kit of hardware and software would travel with the Army’s cyber protection teams, whose job involves hunting inside the military’s networks for intrusions and fighting off cyber attacks. The Army issued a presolicitation notice June 19 for the equipment, called a deployable defensive cyberspace operations infrastructure capability, which would provide commanders with tools for “quick reaction, cyber defense reinforcement, and security enhancement capabilities,” the notice said. The kits would interface with Army networks to let the teams, “conduct countermeasures in real-time enabling commanders to take immediate action in the execution of network defense,” according to an Army news release. (Source: glstrade.com/Defense News)
23 Jun 15. ISRAEL – New Cyber Command to get priority funding. The Israeli military is reportedly planning to consolidate its cyber operations under a Cyber Command, which should be established within 2 years. According to experts in Tel Aviv, the new Cyber Command “is expected to consolidate the bulk of investment spending and receive additional priority funding in the IDF’s new five-year funding plan, dubbed Plan Gideon,” Defense News reports. IDF Chief of Plans, Major General Nimrod Shefer, is quoted as saying “we will be required to make a very large investment in cyber.” The new command will combine the defence and offensive capabilities currently provided by several branches of the IDF and Military Intelligence. (Source: MPI – Hawk Information)
30 Jun 15. Cyberwars between nations are difficult to prove. It is a story that is becoming all-too-familiar: the US government had to admit that one of its key personnel databases, containing the records of up to 4 million staff, had been compromised in a large-scale hacking attack. Officials speaking off the record laid the blame at China’s door, though did not immediately provide any evidence for this claim. The full scale of the information the attackers accessed remains unknown but could include highly sensitive data such as medical records, employment files and financial details, as well as information on security clearances and more. The Office of Personnel Management attack is merely the latest of a number of high-profile hacking attacks in the US. Within the last few months, State Department officials had to abandon their email systems for several weeks after a long-term hack was discovered, while Sony executives spent a miserable few weeks watching their internal emails get reported across the world after their own attack. Those are just a few of the hacking attacks attributed by US officials to nation states – most often China, Russia, or North Korea. But everything about such attacks is murky; finding the perpetrators is difficult if not impossible, as the architecture of the Internet allows for hackers to mask their attack through unwitting users and anonymisation software. Nation states never claim responsibility – the Chinese embassy warned jumping to conclusions about the attack would be “counterproductive” – and no one has any idea of the full scale of hacking attacks, as even those that are discovered have often been going on for months with anyone noticing. Attribution to nation states often relies merely on analysing the sophistication of the attack – while lone hackers such as Gary McKinnon may have once wandered through top secret databases, such efforts now often require far more resources than even sophisticated criminal gangs can muster. The back-and-forth of hacking attacks between governments, somewhat melodramatically referred to as “cyberwar” (though they rarely, if ever, involve death), happen entirely in the shadows, with the method or reason behind any given attack hard to