http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/darpas-star-hacker-looks-to-wikileak-proof-the-pentagon/ By Spencer Ackerman Danger Room Wired.com August 31, 2010 Tomorrow's WikiLeakers may have to be sneakier than just dumping military docs onto a Lady Gaga disc. The futurists at Darpa are working on a project that would make it harder for troops to funnel classified material to WikiLeaks -- or to foreign governments. And that means if you work for the military, get ready to have your web, email and other network usage monitored even more than it is now. Darpa’s new project is called CINDER, for Cyber Insider Threat. It's lead by a legendary hacker-turned-Darpa-manager. CINDER may have preceded Pfc. Bradley Mannings' alleged disclosure of tens of thousands of documents about the Afghanistan war from Defense Department servers. But the idea is to find someone just like him. By hunting for poker-like "tells" in people’s use of Defense Department computer networks, Darpa hopes to find indications of indicate hostile intent or potential removal of sensitive data. "The goal of CINDER will be to greatly increase the accuracy, rate and speed with which insider threats are detected and impede the ability of adversaries to operate undetected within government and military interest networks," according to the defense geeks' request for contractor solicitations on the project. That took on an increased urgency last month after WikiLeaks dropped 77,000 Afghanistan field reports into the public domain. While Admiral Mike Mullen’s furious blood-on-its-hands reaction got all the press coverage, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' response appears to have been the more lasting one, policy-wise. Gates fretted that a casualty of WikiLeaks’ document dump would be the Defense Department's years-long initiative to push vital information down to the front lines, so lower ranking officers and enlisted men had the sort of high-level battlefield views that used to be the province of their commanders. All that’s been jeopardized by Manning, he said, the soldier accused of being WikiLeaks’ inside man. "We want those soldiers in a forward operating base to have all the information they possibly can have that impacts on their own security, but also being able to accomplish their mission," Gates mused in a July press conference. "Should we change the way we approach that, or do we continue to take the risk" of future leaks? Gates partially answered his own question -- however cryptically -- by adding, "There are some technological solutions," though "most of them are not immediately available to us." [...] _______________________________________________________ Subscribe to InfoSec News - www.infosecnews.org http://www.infosecnews.org/mailman/listinfo/isnReceived on Tue Aug 31 2010 - 23:42:48 PDT
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