The Airforce Aims For 'Full Control' Of 'Any And All' Computers

The Airforce Aims For 'Full Control' Of 'Any And All' Computers

blog.wired.com

The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is. And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected."
The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online. The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity iniative." That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks.

(visit the link for the full news article)

Awesome. Now I'm sure many folks will think this is relegated to "foreign terrorists", but with all of the gov propaganda being tossed around about "homegrown terrorism" and the pentagon setting up it's own "mock news" web-sites to spew their own propaganda, it's not hard to see where this may be heading soon...

I won't be suprised to see folks who are protesting the wars or the gov getting targeted with this type of stuff whatsoever...

On Monday, the Air Force Research Laboratory introduced a two-year, $11 million effort to put together hardware and software tools for "Dominant Cyber Offensive Engagement." "Of interest are any and all techniques to enable user and/or root level access to both fixed (PC) or mobile computing platforms... any and all operating systems, patch levels, applications and hardware," a request for proposals notes. And this isn't just some computer science study; "research efforts under this program are expected to result in complete functional capabilities."

Unlike an Air Force colonel's proposal, to knock down enemy websites with military botnets, the Research Lab is encouraging a sneaky, "low and slow" approach. The preferred attack consists of lying quiet, and then "stealthily exfiltrat[ing] information" from adversaries' networks.

But, in the end, the Air Force wants to see all kinds of "techniques and technologies" to "Deceive, Deny, Disrupt, Degrade, [or] Destroy" hostile systems. And "in addition to these main concepts," the Research Lab would like to see studies into "Proactive Botnet Defense Technology Development," the "reinvent[ion of] the network protocol stack" and new antennas, based on carbon nanotubes.

blog.wired.com
(visit the link for the full news article)



[edit on 14-5-2008 by DimensionalDetective]

Not a new concept if all of this is explaining what I think it is...

Ok, Hackers often like to put a backdoor on their victim's computers. Basically, they throw the file into downloads on bittorrent, free screensaver sites.. Basically anywhere they can get people to download the things.

Then the hacker can easily have THOUSANDS of "drone" or "slave" computers... In which they can use them all at once, to pull off a massive attack and take their victim offline. Of course, the hacker can never be tracked down.

At least this is kinda how it was explained to me.
That said, I don't think the white house can come up with anything more invasive than the crap they already have

That's correct LostNemisis. It really doesn't shed anything new, just mainly Denial of Service attack ready machine banks.

Problem is, if the enemy is smart, and you know they are, they are already "hardened" agaist DoS attacks. Bringing down enemy websites and saturating a few subnets is not nearly enough.

DoS attacks are the most effective, but there are many quick and easy ways to defend against them.

The Air Force is aware of China's increasing hacking activities in the form of Information Warfare for the Chinese government. The US govt. wants to be able to conduct offensive attacks as well.

Sounds like the end of freedom of information to me. Call me paranoid, but I'm sick of the government trying every avenue available to stick its huge nose into every nook and cranny of my personal life. Nothing surprises me any more, but it's still extremely disheartening and creepy.

Another sad development in the "War on Cyberspace."

It's seems Bush & Co. is hellbent on destroying the mediums of dissent. They loathe the fact they cannot control the Internet, that it can be used against them to discredit and disprove their policies so of course they want complete, Draconian authority over it.

The whole: "Fighting the spread of evil ideologies", "Cyber-Terrorism" cover is just a farce, a colorful distraction for the public.
This is a deliberate attempt to silence dissenters.

And as always a dissenter can be anyone & everyone. The term "ideologies" is loosely defined just like "torture" is in the Bush Administration, it's a blanket term so they can mold it to suit their agenda as they go along.

Don't forget this has been an unofficial Republican objective since before Bush came into power, only now under the common ruse of sacrificing "liberty for security" are they turning white paper into policy:

CONTROL THE NEW “INTERNATIONAL COMMONS” OF SPACE AND “CYBERSPACE,”

More on PNAC Objectives

What is next really? That's all we can wonder....

As an IT professional, it is depressing and ultimately very annoying that you spend years trying to manage and secure networks, servers and workstations only to find that now you have to keep a look out for a whole new paradigm of attacks, trojans, spoofs, etc that will now be coming from the government - what the hell are you meant to do if you find root kits interfering with operating systems in a corporate environment that you don't know are from malicious hackers or the friggin government?

10 years ago i loved IT news, it was all about new ways of doing business, new of sharing and accessing information, new ways to work with groups globally etc. Now it is all about legal crap, prosecuting people, predators, extremists on forums, terrorism, tapping, government created trojans and all manner of stuff that seems more about scaring people about the online environment.

I have already seen plenty of weird DNS and network related hitches that I suspect is from government interference. Particularly related to news sites, rss feeds, unexplained redirects, news articles getting pulled after being posted.

Case in point: a while back there was a news item about an iraqi soldier called 'ceasar' or something like that that was on patrol with US soldiers, who then allegedly fired on the US soldiers after they refused to stop harassing a pregnant iraqi woman. Now I don't know how true the story was but I know it went out on all major news wires for about an hour or two and was on all major news sites. After that however it just dissappeared, completely, nothing! Couldn't find any reference to it anywhere!

Makes me think then that nothing on the net should be taken for granted if they can remove that information so totally and quickly!

And makes the job of an IT manager and sys admin even harder!