cybersecurity

Cyber Intelligence: Joint Special Cyber Operations

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In recent years, Joint Special Operations Forces (JSOF) around the world have experienced a fair amount of growth. This growth has resulted in a rapid increase in their ranks, a boost in their budgets and an expansion of the scope of their missions.

This growth was further accelerated by the widely publicized Special Operations Forces that were used in the killing of Osama bin Laden. In a press conference from the Pentagon President Obama with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta articulated their vision of the future military.

The new vision states that “we will continue to build and sustain tailored capabilities appropriate for counter terrorism and irregular warfare.” That vision, which was reinforced in a blog post by Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, means growth for JSOF, but does that mean growth into cyber?

Secretary of Defense Panetta made it clear that the Defense Department must invest more in cyber capabilities saying, “Modern armed forces cannot conduct high-tempo, effective operations without reliable information and communication networks and assured access to cyberspace.”

While he did not mention offensive cyber capabilities you can be sure that is a critical capability that will see additional investment.

What if cyber becomes an increased focus and capability of our JSOFs?

As a general principal, our military must protect critical cyber assets while attacking the enemy’s cyber capabilities. Integrating cyber with JSOFs makes allot of sense and will only increase the weaponry and ultimately the value they provide.

Full integration of cyberspace operations into the traditional air-land-sea battle space is not an option! The covert missions carried out by JSOF are among the riskiest and are of the greatest value in the pursuit of national security.

A Joint Special Cyber Operations capability is not an option. Rather, it is a necessity in the highly contested domain of cyber space.


Kevin G. Coleman is a long-time security technology executive and former Chief Strategist at Netscape. He is Senior Fellow with the Technolytics Institute, where he provides consulting services on strategic technology and security issues.
 /  Published January 24, 2012 at 10:04 AM

The Uncertainty Of Mobile Device Security

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At the beginning of his administration, President Obama created a minor controversy by insisting on using a personal mobile device. But much of that debate, such that it was, revolved around presidential records. Little was said, at least publicly, about the profound security implications of the commander in chief sending and receiving important, possibly vital, information through cyberspace.

Appropriately, even less was known about the type of data President Obama accesses, creates, and stores on the device, and the degree to which any such data is stored in “the cloud,” particularly in non-government-controlled cloud storage. What is known, however, is that mobile devices are the most prevalent, and most rapidly expanding, gateways to all types of cloud services. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 24, 2012 at 8:01 AM

When the Virtual Becomes Physical

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Rarely does a week pass that yet another data breach appears on the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse website, and those are only the breaches that are publicly disclosed.

What’s interesting to note is that data breaches are exactly that: an egress of data. Of course, this is nothing new; for over a decade now, we’ve heard countless stories of bank accounts emptied through surreptitious keystroke loggers and successful phishing scams (who can forget such gems as, “I represent the Central Bank of Nigeria, and I have a lucrative proposal for you…”), healthcare data breached due to poor security controls, and systems brought down for extended periods via denial of service attacks from zombie hosts managed by vast-reaching command-and-control systems. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 20, 2012 at 7:00 AM

How Tablets Are Helping Government Employees Get More Stuff Done

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Consider this: At the beginning of the day you’ve got two computing devices sitting in front of you, a laptop and an iPad. Which do you turn to first?

The laptop’s undoubtedly more powerful, but to use it, you’ll likely need to press the power button, wait a few minutes for it to fire up, wait a few more minutes for various programs to load, then take a few more minutes to find what you’re looking for. The iPad, on the other hand, sips energy ever so slowly and hardly ever needs to be powered down. Everything is easily accessible with the touch of a finger, and apps launch almost instantaneously. And, as portable as the laptop is, the iPad is even more so. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 19, 2012 at 2:45 PM

Feds@Work: VA’s Peter Levin Pursues ‘Art Of The Possible’ In IT Innovation

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As chief technology officer of the Veterans Affairs Department, Dr. Peter Levin isn’t tasked with making sure that routers are maintained or seeing that the network stays up. Far from it. You could say he’s more of a technology conceptualist.

Rather than “chief technology officer”–a position at VA to which he was appointed in 2009–he might have been more appropriately titled “chief innovation officer.” Keep reading →

 /  Published January 19, 2012 at 9:00 AM

Resiliency: The Future of Global Cyber Power

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2011 could very well be called “Year of the Cyber Attack” given the thousands of reported and unreported hacking events. There is no doubt cyber threats facing governments and companies have certainly increased, but they’ve been met by host of powerful new ways to respond to them. Like a sickness to the body, industry and government have been working hard to build immunity with varying degrees of success.

Virtualization and cloud strategies now allow large and small companies to manage their data architecture with a flexibility that was impossible a few years ago. New collaboration software allows them to share documents more reliably on secure storage spaces. Modern data centers allow them to make their data continuously available to those who should have access to it, and invisible to those who don’t. The exponential growth of mobile devices drives an exponential growth in security risks. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 18, 2012 at 11:02 AM

IT Security Professional Or Warrior – Who Should Agencies Hire?

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What do well-balanced information security professionals look like, and why should the government be hiring them?

With the release of the National Initiative for Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Framework and much talk about the cyber human capital crisis, one question that keeps coming up is “what type of information security professional should agencies be hiring?” Keep reading →

 /  Published January 18, 2012 at 8:03 AM

Vivek Kundra Missing The Mark Again? | Commentary

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I got the announcement a couple days ago that Vivek Kundra is joining Salesforce.com as executive vice president of emerging markets, and the invitation to be first to post a comment.

Mark Amtower beat me to it and he was right to the point: “Is Salesforce.com part of that “IT Cartel” that Vivek warned us about?” Keep reading →

 /  Published January 17, 2012 at 5:06 PM

Cyber Intelligence: Cyber Burn-out

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It was bound to happen and it appears it has just begun – cyber burn-out.

Recently a few security professional expressed symptoms that are associated with burn-out. This type of attitude is so uncharacteristic of these individuals. They are talking about, and more importantly, exhibiting the depletion and drain of professional drive. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 16, 2012 at 10:15 AM

US CIO Uses Electronics Show To Announce New Federal Mobility Plans

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Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel today announced a new set of initiatives to spur broader adoption of mobile technology for the federal government, calling 2012 “the year of mobile government.”

Speaking at a government conference held at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, VanRoekel described a new 2012 “Roadmap for Federal Mobility” that would put an emphasis on governance, sharing technologies wherever possible, and collaborating with the private sector to accelerate adoption. Keep reading →

 /  Published January 11, 2012 at 5:31 PM
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