U.S. military developing simple-to-use cyber attack devices

There are two sides to cyberwarfare — defensive (protecting your own systems) and offensive (disrupting the adversary’s systems). The U.S. military is trying to boost its ability to conduct offensive cyberwarfare, and it is looking for ways to make it easier for non-expert soldiers on the front lines to disrupt enemy networks.

Aviation Week’s David Fulghum reports that a new generation of attack devices is being developed, with the goal of having it packaged and brought to the battlefield and used by non-specialists to penetrate satellites, VoIP networks, and supervisory control and data acquisition systems (SCADA). The facilitate the development of such devices, DARPA has awarded several contracts to information technology companies to design a cyberattack range. Candidate sites include Naval Air Warfare Center’s China Lake, California, radar cross-section facility, and the U.S. Air Force radar cross-section range at Holloman AFB, New Mexico.

Fulghum was allowed to examine device and he offers an interesting description of its features. The device is designed to allow U.S. 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.

“Right now, all that information is in the head of a few guys that do computer network operations and there is no training system,” one researcher told Fulghum.