[ISN] Cyberwar Doomsayer Lands $34 Million in Government Cyberwar Contracts

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:25:39 -0500 (CDT)
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/booz-allen/

By Ryan Singel 
Threat Level
Wired.com
April 13, 2010 

Last month, the former Director of National Intelligence Michael 
McConnell boldly took to the Senate floor and the Washington Post's 
editorial page to declare "The United States is fighting a cyber-war 
today, and we are losing."

Thankfully for the American people, his company -- the giant defense 
contractor Booz Allen Hamilton -- has now landed the contract to build 
the Air Force's cyberwar control center. For a measly $14.4 million in 
taxpayer money, the outfit will help build a new cyberwar bunker for the 
U.S. Cyber Command, a wing of the Air Force.

Additionally, Booz Allen Hamilton won another contract for $20 million 
to "foster collaboration among telecommunications researchers, 
University of Maryland faculty members and other academic institutions 
to improve secure networking and telecommunications and boost 
information assurance," Washington Technology reports. While that might 
sound like a lot of money to set up a mailing list and a wiki, please 
don’t be cynical. Undoubtedly, McConnell’s crack team of consultants are 
providing the researchers with around-the-clock bodyguards and 
state-of-the-art bullet-proof monitors.

Meanwhile, we urge U.S. netizens to refrain from un-patriotic musings 
that McConnell intentionally uses fear and exaggerated rhetoric to land 
these kinds of contracts for his company and instead, be vigilant and 
keep their eyes out for signs of Chinese hackers (one telltale sign is a 
"Made in China" label on the bottom of your laptop).

[...]


___________________________________________________________
Register now for HITBSecConf2010 - Dubai, the premier 
deep-knowledge network security event in the GCC, 
featuring keynote speakers John Viega and Matt Watchinski! 
http://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf2010dxb/
Received on Tue Apr 13 2010 - 22:25:39 PDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Tue Apr 13 2010 - 22:31:38 PDT