[ISN] US military shows off hack-by-numbers battlefield gadget

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 03:42:00 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/22/military_cyberwar_gadget/

By Dan Goodin in San Francisco 
The Register
22nd May 2009 

As the US military strives to boost its ability to wage cyber warfare, 
it's looking for ways to make it easier for non-expert soldiers on the 
front lines to wreak havoc on enemy networks.

Enter a new generation of attack devices that is packaged to be brought 
into the battlefield and used by non-specialists to penetrate 
satellites, voice over internet networks, and supervisory control and 
data acquisition systems. Aviation Week recently got a peek at one 
device and provided a rich description of its features.

The device is designed to allow US forces to test enemy networks for a 
wide range of vulnerabilities and then synthesize the results so they 
can be acted on quickly. It offers touch-screen dashboards and sliders 
to make enumeration and penetration more intuitive. One display shows a 
schematic of an enemy network and identifies its nodes. A sliding lever 
can be moved to increase an attack or dial it down to reduce collateral 
damage.

The device is designed to take a slew of algorithms for monitoring and 
penetrating networks and put them into an easy-to-use package. Think of 
it as a hack-by-numbers gadget for combat forces.

[...]


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Received on Tue May 26 2009 - 01:42:00 PDT

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