Justin Lynch, Author at Military Times

CENTCOM chief: The future of warfare demands more cyber authorities

Justin Lynch — Tue, 18 Dec 2018 19:14:12 +0000

The Pentagon has received more power to conduct cyber operations in the past 18 months. But for the top Army commander in the Middle East and Central Asia, the new authority is not enough.

The head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, wrote in a Dec. 18 paper that the Pentagon must “normalize” electronic warfare and cyberattacks and incorporate them into daily operations.

“Normalizing the cyberspace domain means broader authorities that are more responsive than current bureaucratic processes,” Votel wrote in the Army’s Cyber Defense Review. “It also means we need simple and streamlined organizations and processes to increase lethality and enhance performance.”

The paper was coauthored by Votel, Maj. Gen. Julazadeh and Maj. Weilun Lin.

“Our failure to operationalize and normalize the cyberspace domain effectively cedes it to our adversaries, gives them a competitive advantage and, ultimately, creates an increased attack vector against our objectives,” the authors said.

President Trump gave the Pentagon new authorities to conduct cyber operations in August and minimized the process where other agencies can object to cyberattacks, known as “deconfliction.”

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis can conduct hacking operations without approval from the White House so long as they do not interfere with the American “national interest,” according to four current and former White House and intelligence officials who were either part of internal deliberations or briefed on the changes.

Yet some current and former U.S. officials are skeptical that the new authorities will mean more effective hacking operations for the Pentagon, because it does not solve the nuances of cyberattacks.

But the new mandates do not go far enough for the three officer authors, who argued that cyberwarfare should be under the same authorities as other types of operations.

“We must not see cyberspace as drastically different and separate from other domains that we create new processes to prepare, plan and fight in this new domain. We continue to seek processes that smooth and simplify operations, reducing friendly friction and accelerating decision-making.”

Current and former Pentagon officials have pointed to conducting cyberattacks against enemies that use networks of neutral or partner nations as an area where the Pentagon has changed its decision-making process in recent years. Those officials also pointed to how the Pentagon was able to use hybrid warfare tactics during the 2016 liberation of Mosul, Iraq, as a textbook example of future hybrid operations.

Votel, Julazadeh and Lin echoed the sentiment of other Pentagon officials who have advocated for cyberattacks, electronic warfare and other information operations to be integrated earlier in military operations.

“We need to proactively execute cyberspace and information operations early in ‘Phase 0 / steady state’ of the planning process — well before operation execution. Only then can we shape the [information environment], hold our adversaries’ capabilities at risk and execute at the speed of war,” the three wrote.

For example, Pentagon officials say they closely monitored Russia’s 2014 hybrid war in Ukraine and learned from Moscow’s tactics.

Votel, Julazadeh and Lin shed light on the changes, writing that information operations were previously “integrated as an afterthought.” Yet over the last two years, Central Command has incorporated cyberattacks, electronic warfare and military deception at the “strategic level.”

And this hybrid warfare has driven new acquisition demands in the Pentagon.

“We need technology and capabilities to keep pace with the operational environment and continue to build the partnerships to do so,” the three officers wrote.

In recent years, Central Command has bolstered its hybrid warfare through new contracts. The centerpiece of that effort is a July 2017 contract worth $621 million to Science Applications International Corporation for IT support to Central Command that could last seven years.

In August 2018, Vistra communications was also awarded a $22 million contract to support offensive and defensive cyber operations for Central Command.

Behind the White House’s plan to be more aggressive in cyberspace

Justin Lynch — Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:57:00 +0000

The warnings came from Donald Trump’s predecessor, top spies and Kim Jong Un himself.

So when the North Korean leader promised to tame Trump with “fire,” in September 2017, White House officials considered how to slow the Asian country’s march to developing a nuclear weapon.

During a meeting in late 2017, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis presented a military strategy and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson presented a diplomatic answer. But when it came time to discuss intelligence and hacking options for the National Security Agency and U.S. Cyber Command, some on Trump’s team were frustrated with the answer. They argued the NSA couldn’t digitally deter Kim.

For nearly a year, White House leaders had debated the rules for how America should operate in cyberspace. After brazen hacks by the Chinese and Russian governments that targeted millions of Americans and the 2016 presidential election respectively, senior officials believed they needed to stop the raid on American bits and bytes.

Administration leaders broadly fell into two camps. The first blamed Obama-era rules to operate in cyberspace as too timid and the reason America did not have digital options to deter North Korea’s nuclear program. Unleashing viruses that could upend North Korea’s rockets would require a wide swath of consensus across U.S. government agencies, which all but stifled many hacking plans.

Other officials, such as then Homeland Security adviser Tom Bossert, disagreed, and over a period of months argued that while the procedures needed to change, loosening the rules of engagement too liberally and without caution would be dangerous.

A decision loomed.

While the North Korean debate did not lead to immediate policy changes, it was one of several events that helped push the Trump administration toward a new cybersecurity strategy, according to four current and former White House and intelligence officials who were in the room or briefed on the situation. When the White House announced the new policy in September, national security adviser John Bolton was blunt: “We’re going to do a lot of things offensively, and I think our adversaries need to know that.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin (C) stands during a visit to the church of the Protaton in Karyes, the administrative centre of the all-male Orthodox monastic community of Mount Athos, on May 28, 2016. Putin, who has often talked about his strong Orthodox faith, will join celebrations for the 1,000th anniversary of the Russian presence at the ancient community of Mount Athos. The visit, Putin’s first to the EU since December, comes at a low ebb in relations between Russia and Europe over the conflict in Ukraine that broke out in 2014, with sanctions still in force against Moscow. / AFP / POOL / ALEXANDROS AVRAMIDIS (Photo credit should read ALEXANDROS AVRAMIDIS/AFP/Getty Images)

America enters the cyber age

In the early 2010s, Russia was known inside the U.S. intelligence community for its clandestine cyber operations. If White House administrators or National Security Agency analysts spotted Moscow’s cyberwarriors probing American networks before 2014, the Kremlin spies would often suddenly disappear.

“The Russians were known for being stealthy and highly targeted. If you saw them on the network, they would vanish like ghosts and go quiet,” Michael Daniel, the top cybersecurity official at the Obama administration, told Fifth Domain.

“After 2014 they start becoming much more aggressive. We start detecting them trying to penetrate U.S. government networks and instead of melting away they come right back at us, saying ‘I dare you to try and find us. I dare you to try and kick us off your network.’”

One of the first digital disinformation operations against the United States targeted diplomats. Digital sleuths from the Kremlin listened in on a phone call between Victoria Nuland, then the top U.S. American diplomat to Europe, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, according to the State Department. Nuland and Pyatt discussed how to support a new government in Ukraine. Nuland believed the Europeans were being too timid and made her position clear in colorful language.

The phone call was being secretly recorded and was posted to YouTube days later.

“It wasn’t their first use of cyber and aggressive tactics, including manipulating emails and leaking things,” said Nuland, who is now head of the Center for a New American Security. “What was new is their targeting of Americans and the United States in a way where their hand was not masked. Obviously, they denied it, but it was transparent what was going on.”

“What is most interesting is looking at Putin’s first and second term, where they were still relatively cautious about their espionage and tradecraft, as they were in Soviet Union operations. They used only authorized trade professionals and tried to mask their hand to have real deniability,” Nuland said. “Compare that to Putin’s third and fourth term, where they are almost gleeful in their non-denial denials.”

Russian hackers breached the White House’s networks and swiped President Obama’s email correspondence in 2014, according to the New York Times. Two days before Christmas in 2015, Russian hackers allegedly used spear-phishing emails and malicious code embedded in Microsoft Word documents to launch the first publicly acknowledged cyberattack in the world to cause power outages against Ukraine.

But the Russian government was not the only country developing a playbook for hacking. China was revving up a campaign to infiltrate the U.S. government as well.

In April 2015, U.S. officials say that China hacked records of 22 million government officials that were stored by the Office of Personnel Management. That included copies of all U.S. government security clearances. Everything from romantic affairs to undercover assignments to work histories of top-secret programs were pilfered by the Chinese. It was a wakeup call for the U.S. government, Jim Richberg, a national intelligence manager at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, told Fifth Domain.

The intelligence community needed to re-think what was a target for foreign hackers. “It was kind of a eureka moment of, ‘Oh my goodness, look what can be done and look at the value of data like that.’ That was a watershed,” Richberg said. “There is no dataset too big to talk about potentially exposing.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, shakes hands with U.S. national security adviser John Bolton during their Oct. 23, 2018, meeting in the Kremlin in Moscow. (Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP)

Election meddling

It took less than a year for another historic breach.

In a cream-colored building with roman arches near the meandering Moscow River, Russian intelligence officials sent a spear-phishing email to Tony Podesta, the campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton on March 19, 2016. The hackers disguised the email as a Google security notification and tricked Podesta into changing his password. An accompanying link was a disguised Russian intelligence agency website, and the Kremlin spies soon swiped a trove of emails. Russian officials then passed the emails to WikiLeaks, according to a July 13 indictment from Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

“The Russians were over time perfecting their ability to target social media to specific political objective in their own country, in Ukraine, and across Europe before 2016,” Nuland said during 2018 Senate testimony,

But to leaders inside the U.S. government, Russia’s role was not immediately clear. Former U.S. officials said the assessment of Moscow’s responsibility solidified around June after Americans analyzed the activity of Guccifer 2.0, who claimed to be a digital vigilante but was actually a group of Russian spies, according to the Mueller indictment.

It was then that Russian hackers allegedly broke into the Illinois state election network and stole voter registration information of up to 200,000 people. While the hack remained secret for weeks, it set off alarms within the White House and intelligence agencies, two former U.S. officials said.

Jeh Johnson, Obama’s head of the Department of Homeland Security, began contacting state election officials to encourage them to strengthen their cybersecurity efforts, but the effort had mixed success. Some state and local election officials did not trust the Department of Homeland Security and inaccurately believed they were embarking on a federal takeover of the voting process, Suzanne Spaulding, then an undersecretary at the agency, told Fifth Domain. In terse phone calls with Johnson, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp refused help from the federal government. Kemp, now the governor-elect in Georgia, did not respond to a request for comment.

President Barack Obama shakes hands with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Trump in charge

From the onset of the Trump administration, former and current White House and Pentagon officials were set on changing how the America operated in cyberspace. With information about Russia’s hacking and disinformation becoming clearer by the day, their discussion took a new sense of urgency.

Government officials recalled the shock of the incoming Trump team when they learned how conservative the military was when it came to hacking. “The incoming Trump administration had this assumption that the U.S. was some big gorilla in cyberspace and was actively hacking everyone. There was a little bit of surprise that U.S. policy was very conservative,” a former White House official told Fifth Domain.

The Obama-era rules that governed American cyber operations were called Presidential Policy Directive 20 and said that cyber operations likely to result in “significant consequences” needed presidential approval. Hacking operations also needed to have near unanimous consent between U.S. government agencies.

In memos and long email chains, officials from the State Department, CIA and the NSA often argued to take a more cautious approach for hacking operations, according to former Obama administration officials. Those officials argued that destroying a server that an enemy like the Islamic State used would eliminate valuable intelligence. This was counterproductive, these officials argued, because the NSA wanted to silently sit on an enemy’s computer network and collect intelligence.

Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was among those who expressed frustration with America’s cyber operations, particularly against the Islamic State. Whenever Cyber Command had a plan to hack the Islamic State, “the intelligence community tended to delay or try to prevent its use, claiming cyber operations would hinder intelligence collection. In short, none of our agencies showed very well in the cyber fight,” Carter wrote in a Harvard University paper in 2017.

The clash of philosophies meant gridlock. “Sometimes we would meet for 90 minutes to two hours, and then at the end decide that we need to come back tomorrow for part two,” an Obama White House official told Fifth Domain.

Current and former officials recalled a rough beginning to the Trump administration’s cyber planning. National security adviser Michael Flynn brought in a team of staffers who had a hawkish view on cybersecurity, according to four current and former White House and Pentagon officials. When White House officials drafted the first executive order on cybersecurity it was sloppy, according to two former White House officials, with one adding that it included a potentially hostile and unexpected reference to nuclear weapons. And when intelligence agencies asked for permission to partner with European governments, they were given carte blanche to operate without raising the policy to senior Trump administration officials, one former official said.

But most conversations led back to changing America’s offensive cyber operations.

People watch a TV screen showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, right, and U.S. President Donald Trump at the Seoul Railway Station in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, March 9, 2018. (Ahn Young-joon/AP)

Leaders in the Trump administration were set on changing how the United States operated in cyberspace. The question was whether the White House was going to modify the Obama rules or throw them out completely. Bossert, Trump’s clean-cut homeland security adviser, was respected by U.S. officials because of his experience in the Bush administration.

“What we need to do, living in the largest cyber glass house in the world, is to figure out how to increase our defenses and put in place a rational strategy before we go out and do things that are going to make us – and our private critical infrastructure owners – more vulnerable,” Bossert said during the July 2017 Aspen Security Forum.

Mattis embraced the rising role of cyber and digital warfare, and his office pushed to have more authority. Pentagon leaders said they needed to conduct cyber operations just like they could with land, air and sea, creating a lethal swarm of digital and physical attacks. Other officials also argued that more offensive cyber operations would be a deterrent for nations hacking America, like Russia and China.

For some, an inflection point came as the White House considered options to deter North Korea’s nuclear capability. The lines of code honed inside NSA labs to monitor, stop or alter Pyongyang’s nuclear and military capably would likely have to travel through China, which supplies nearly all North Korea’s internet. During previous debates, officials feared China might mistakenly believe the Americans were hacking them instead of North Korea. The scenario was deemed too risky by some because it could have unforeseen consequences. Advocates for the more aggressive approach in cyberspace argued that the Obama-era rules for cyberspace effectively blocked America from embedding and prepositioning this malware inside of North Korea’s systems. As a result, America was empty-handed when it came to hacking options, according to this line of thinking.

But other officials disagreed. Rather, some in the administration, such as Bossert, believed that the Obama rules in cyberspace were being unfairly scapegoated, as if the nuances of hacking another nation would disappear with more authority. According to this view, America needed to take more aggressive actions in cyberspace to deter foreign countries, but glossing over the nuances of hacking was also dangerous.

And by some accounts there was also evidence that America already had effective hacking programs to deter North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

According to Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” during the Obama administration, the United States was able to infect the North Korean government’s missile telemetry with malware that caused errors in their launch sequence. Two former intelligence officials said that North Korea offers limited cyber options because a majority of the country does not have internet access. And by cutting off North Korea’s internet, U.S. officials feared they could also lose intelligence capabilities.

Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone gives his arrival remarks during a Change of Command ceremony for United States Army Cyber Command and Second Army at , Va., on Friday, October 14, 2016. (Alan Lessig/Staff)

Both the Pentagon and the NSA declined to comment and respond to questions.

Publicly, support for more offensive cyber operations came in the form of congressional testimony from Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the NSA, and the incoming commander, Gen. Paul Nakasone.

“President Putin has clearly come to the conclusion there is little price to pay here … and that therefore I can continue this activity,” Rogers told Congress in February 2018.

‘Our hands are not tied’

After Trump’s national security adviser H.R. McMaster left the White House in March 2018, Trump replaced him with John Bolton. Days later, Bossert was pushed out of the White House, along with the White House cybersecurity coordinator Rob Joyce.

At the time, a senior Pentagon cyber official described the administration’s cyber policy as “a potential catastrophe.” The official explained how critical cyber issues were not being coordinated and briefings were either being missed or not even taking place.

That summer, the White House finalized its strategy to overhaul the Obama rules from cyberspace. Mattis was given the ability to conduct cyber operations without authority from the president except if it could interfere with the “national interest” of the United States. After Trump rescinded the Obama-era rules Aug. 15, Bolton described the changes in drastic terms.

“Our hands are not tied as they were in the Obama administration,” Bolton said. “Our presidential directive effectively reversed those restraints, enabling offensive cyber operations through the relevant departments.”

Still, some current and former U.S. officials caution that greater authority in cyberspace might not actually deter hacking from foreign nations in some situations.

And there are questions about if the new cyber authorities will have any effect at all on offensive operations. Some experts argue that the officials making a decision about whether to hack another country are more important than the process they use.

“What the Russians did is a little bit like 9/11,” Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the NSA under the Bush administration, told Fifth Domain. “It was an attack from an unexpected direction against a previously unappreciated target.”

Hayden believes that America has encountered a new threat, and like the September 11th attacks, the U.S. government needs a dedicated effort to respond to Russia’s hacking. “President Bush did that. A lot of it was controversial, but you can’t argue it wasn’t extraordinary. President Trump has never called on us to go extraordinary. Everyone is doing their best, but they are playing traditional positions.”

Warner wants more Pentagon spending on cybersecurity

Justin Lynch — Fri, 07 Dec 2018 20:33:55 +0000

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va, the ranking member of the Senate’s intelligence committee, called for a realignment of Pentagon spending priorities to boost cybersecurity and technology investments amid a “new era of nation-state conflict.”

While speaking Dec. 7 at the Center for a New American Security, Warner said the Pentagon should review its focus on conventional weapons systems after aggressive cyber operations by the Russian and Chinese governments.

“We need to realign our priorities while we still can” Warner said. “We need to redirect some of our DoD spending to cyber and, frankly, within other parts of our government, misinformation and disinformation.”

The Pentagon has a $8.5 billion budget for cybersecurity funding in fiscal 2019, according to the White House.

Warner’s comments come amid uncertainty in the Pentagon budget process. The White House Office of Management and Budget has ordered the Pentagon to cut its budget to $733 billion in FY 20, a cut of roughly $33 billion. Pentagon officials and some lawmakers are opposed to the cuts.

In his speech, Warner took aim at two countries for the rise of the nation-state conflict: Russia and China.

Russia devotes “a much greater portion of its much smaller budget to cyber and other tools of asymmetric warfare,” Warner said. When it comes to cyber, Russia is already America’s peer, Warner warned, and when it comes to disinformation and misinformation, Russia “is already ahead of us.”

What Russia spent on disinformation campaigns during the 2017 French and 2016 American elections as well as the 2016 British referendum to leave the European Union was less one F-35 fighter jet, Warner said.

“The notion that this is a one-off isn’t the case,” Warner said.

But in addition to Russia’s growing cyber capabilities, Warner said that China poses a threat because of its defense priorities.

While China spends an estimated $200 billion per year on its defense budget, Warner said the country spends a disproportionate amount on areas of asymmetric warfare.

“The frightening thing to me is the delta of what we spend on our defense budget and what China spends, that $500 million. China is investing in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and 5G and a whole host of other technologies where China wants to be our peer.”

Experts have warned the United States is too reliant on conventional capabilities.

“We are in a great place if we have to re-fight the Persian gulf war,” said Paul Scharre, senior fellow and director at the Center for a New American Security. “Russia doesn’t have to fight us in a military way and they can attack the central nervous system of American democracy,

Seeking counter-terrorism partnership, Trump dangles removing Sudan from state sponsor of terror list

Justin Lynch — Wed, 07 Nov 2018 05:32:25 +0000

Fourteen years after the United States accused the Sudanese government of genocide in Darfur, the Trump administration is entering a new chapter of engagement with Khartoum and offering the possibility of removing the African nation from the state sponsor of terror list.

The State Department agreed to a second phase of rapprochement with Sudan Nov. 6, laying out six priorities that if filled by Khartoum would remove one of the last remaining barriers between two nations that have been at odds for nearly three decades.

The terrorism designation was first placed on Sudan by the Clinton administration in 1993.

While no specific timeline was placed for the removal of the terrorism designation, a State Department official told reporters that a decision would be made sometime between six months and four years.

For the Sudanese government, the designation would signify a normalization of relations with the West after decades of being an outcast.

If the terrorism designation is dropped, Sudan will ask for financial support from the International Monetary Fund and look for foreign direct investment, Foreign Minister Al-Dirdiri Mohamed Ahmed told reporters. The terrorism designation is a “stigma” for Sudan, Ahmed said, arguing that the U.S. unfairly placed the label on his country.

Under the second round of normalization the U.S. said that it would drop the terrorism designation if Sudan ceased internal hostilities, expanded humanitarian access, improved human rights, addressed terrorism related claims, expanded counter terrorism cooperation and worked to curtail North Korean activity.

In particular, White House officials under the Trump administration have been eager to expand relations with the Sudanese government in order to work on counter-terrorism issues, U.S. officials have told the Military Times. The officials said that most of the American counter-terrorism and special-forces operations are aimed at countering the Islamic State and monitoring events in Libya.

Sudan also hosts one of the largest CIA sites in the region, according to former U.S. officials.

The rapprochement with Sudan is bipartisan and long expected.

The process began under the Obama administration. In 2010, the U.S. government similarly offered to lift the terrorism designation if Khartoum agreed to a series of steps, according to internal White House and State Department documents obtained by the Military Times. The “USG package,” as one document is titled, required that Sudan “refrain from provocative military activities” as it was preparing to grant southern Sudan independence, among other steps. The requirements were not met.

Still, the Obama administration formally began a process of normalization in January 2017. However, some are skeptical that Khartoum has changed.

“Sudan’s human rights record remains extremely poor, with instances of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, arbitrary arrest and detention, forced population movements, rape, slavery and severely restricted freedom of assembly with violent suppression of protests,” read an internal 2017 State Department memo, which was obtained by the ACLU in a lawsuit.

In 2004, the Bush administration accused Khartoum of orchestrating a genocide in Darfur. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir is still wanted by the International Criminal Court.

In Darfur and other contested regions “there is still conflict despite the absence of indiscriminate wholesale bombing and burning of villages that characterized earlier stages in both conflicts,” Jehanne Henry, a Sudan expert at Human Rights Watch told the Military Times.

Henry noted that under the Trump administration’s second round of engagement with Sudan, “human rights and religious freedoms are lumped into one. This is ill-advised, especially in the absence of clear benchmarks for success because religious freedoms stands as only one of many problem areas in Sudan’s human rights record.”

But the Sudanese foreign minister argued otherwise.

“Darfur’s chapter has already been closed,” Ahmed said, claiming that the accusations of genocide have been “disproven.”

International journalists have been mostly barred by the Sudanese government from legally entering Darfur for nearly a decade, however Ahmed made a personal commitment to grant the Military Times a visa to the region.

The journalist “is a good student,” Ahmed muttered in Arabic to the Sudanese Ambassador, Mohammed Atta. He then switched back to English and assured the journalists of his pledge.

“You are most welcome.”

Inside the Pentagon’s struggle to build a cyber force

Justin Lynch — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 21:46:34 +0000

The Pentagon is taking new steps to build cyber talent in the U.S. military, but experts suggest the armed forces have structural problems that prevent them from becoming a digitally cohesive unit.

Current and former U.S. military officials also tell Fifth Domain that recruiting enough cyber forces is a struggle for the Pentagon.

The U.S. Air Force’s cyber warfare operations is only 46 percent filled, according to a 2016 Air Force Research Institute report, the most recent year available.

The Pentagon is hoping to hire 8,300 cyber positions starting this year, Brig. Gen. Dennis Crall told lawmakers Sept. 26.

“It’s difficult to recruit competent quality that we’re looking for in every part of the country. In some cases, it’s due to high-demand, low-density assets,” Crall said. “There’s just really a strict competition. In other place, they just don’t exist, writ large, where we need them.”

“We recognize that we are in a competition for talent,” Gen. Richard Angle told reporters at an Aug. 8 roundtable. He said that the Army is currently recruiting enough cyber soldiers but if the force wants to grow, it will have to increase its retention. “This is a very high-demand space with a low density population to draw from.”

Angle said that the Pentagon is considering changing the ratio of civilian and military officials in its national mission force, although no decision has been made.

Noting its issues, the Pentagon has taken some steps to attract and retain talent.

The Department of Defense announced Oct. 25 that it is opening the Tatooine workspace in Augusta, Georgia, a facility that will house civilian and military officials working on cyber issues.

In the new work space, Pentagon officials will be working together in “unclassified, collaborative, startup-like spaces using technology and tools found in the private sector,” the Department of Defense said in a statement.

The partnership will “serve as a powerful retention and recruitment tool,” said Lieutenant General Stephen Fogarty, which is expected to occur because top tech talent will be cultivated and supported with the program.

Projects included in the new center include hunting for adversaries in Pentagon networks and redesigning training for cyber soldiers, as well as drone-detection technologies.

This summer, U.S. Cyber Command also went on a hiring spree and created a new process to recruit professionals. The new process included on-the-spot job offers and the first-ever public hiring event.

But the new steps are not likely to be enough, according to former military officials. They tell Fifth Domain that the Pentagon needs to consider using civilians for some tasks.

“We really need to think hard about what needs to be in uniform, what is nice to be in uniform, and what just needs to be done,” said Bryson Bort, a former U.S. Army officer and the founder of SCYTHE, a cybersecurity firm.

“There is a lack of understanding in the combat arms about what cyber could be beyond the latest du jour.”

Hiring cyber talent is a national security priority, a 2018 Defense Science Board report argued.

“The recruiting challenge in the military is especially challenging because of the competition they face with the private sector,” Dave Weinstein, a former official at U.S. cyber command told Fifth Domain.

“A lot of DoD roles are not open to civilians. If the Pentagon approach staffing agnostic of whether or not the person wears a uniform for cyber, they might expand their access to human capital.”

Polar fitness app broadcasted sensitive details of intelligence and service members

Justin Lynch — Mon, 09 Jul 2018 02:58:38 +0000

Military officials working at nuclear weapons facilities. FBI and NSA employees. Americans in the sensitive Green Zone of Bagdad, Iraq.

These are some of the military or intelligence officials who could be identified using public data from the popular Polar Flow fitness platform, according to an investigation by the news website Bellingcat and the Dutch news agency De Correspondent. The public data could be a gold-mine of sensitive information and represents one of the largest open-source security vulnerabilities for the Department of Defense since a similar lapse was found in the Strava exercise app in January.

More than 6,500 users who worked at more than 200 sensitive sites across the world appear to have been unknowingly broadcasting their exercise location and their name to the entire world, according to the joint investigation.

Bellingcat was able to pinpoint the name of a “high-ranking officer” at a base known to host nuclear weapons. It took just a few clicks. Using the Polar Flow app and other information found on the internet, De Correspondent was able to collect a disturbing amount of one Dutch solider’s personal information. They found the name of the solider, the fact he was stationed at one of the key locations where the war against the Islamic State is being waged from, the soldier’s home address, and the names of his wife and kids.

Because of its broad search functions, public data appears to be easier to find in the Polar Flow application compared to the Strava fitness website.

Due to the joint investigation, Polar has disabled the ability to search for exercise data on its platform. In a statement, the company said that “there has been no breach of private data,” and that users must “opt-in” to have their training locations public. Polar reminded users “to avoid publicly sharing GPS files of sensitive locations.”

The investigation comes as the Department of Defense has warned its employees and soldiers to be aware of the information it chooses to make public over the internet.“

Protect your health, biometrics and financial information,” wrote Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis in a June memo. “The potential consequences of compromised data could be serious, not just for you and your families, but for the readiness and resiliency of this department.”

A spokesperson for Polar and the Department of Defense were not immediately available for comment.

Japanese peacekeepers arrive in South Sudan with new powers

Justin Lynch — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 15:10:56 +0000

JUBA, South Sudan — Japanese peacekeepers, with a broader mandate to use force, landed in South Sudan on Monday, the first overseas deployment of the country’s troops with those expanded powers in nearly 70 years.

Dressed in green camouflage uniform, squad leader Yoshino Tanaka stepped off the plane at the head of the Japanese group. He was greeted by and shook hands with Japan’s ambassador to South Sudan, Masahiko Kiya.

The 350 Self-Defense Forces will replace a previous contingent of Japanese peacekeepers who served in the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, but did not have mandate to use force. The new troops will be tasked with engineering and construction in the capital, Juba.

For the first time since the end of World War II, these peacekeepers will have the ability to use force to protect civilians, U.N. staff and themselves. Japan’s constitution, drafted under U.S. direction after the war, forbids the use of force in settling international disputes but the government has reinterpreted the constitution to allow Japanese troops to use force in some situations.

Approved by the Japanese legislature in 2015, the expanded capacity to use of force was opposed by some in Japan who feared that it could entangle the country’s military in an overseas conflict and that it violates Japan’s anti-war constitution.

But Japanese Prime Minister Shinto Abe argued that the broader military powers give Japan the ability to respond to growing threats that include China’s increasing military assertiveness and North Korea’s nuclear ambitions.

The deployment shows the growing trust the Japanese public places in its Self-Defense Forces, Sheila Smith, a senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations told the Associated Press.

However she said that many “people are worried that this first case of the Self-Defense Forces’ greater powers could run into problems and be put into a bad situation in South Sudan.”

The forces’ expanded powers will first be tested in the troubled East African nation that has seen continuous fighting since its civil war broke out in December 2013. There are more than 12,000 U.N. peacekeepers already in South Sudan who have faced criticism for failing to protect civilians.

In July, two Chinese peacekeepers died and five others were wounded after their vehicle was struck with a rocket propelled grenade as fighting swept Juba.

Japan’s Self-Defense Forces will still not be able to engage with an opposing army — like South Sudan’s — the only force that is in the capital, said the Council on Foreign Relations’ Smith.

“It’s not as if Japan has unleashed its military,” she said.