Air Force Cyber Command

By Ben Erwin
Thanks to the latest Die Hard movie, I’m still fighting the urge to unplug my microwave to foil hacker attempts. Thanks to the U.S. government, however, we have a new line of defense against kitchen appliances of mass destruction.
The U.S. government has setup a new command center in the Air Force called Air Force Cyber Command or AFCYBER. Here’s the summarized mission of AFCYBER, according to Air Force Secretary Wynne:

“The aim is to develop a major command that stands alongside Air Force Space Command and Air Combat Command as the provider of forces that the President, combatant commanders and the American people can rely on for preserving the freedom of access and commerce, in air, space and now cyberspace.”

There are real threats; Estonia came under attack from hackers back in April of 2007 And in September of 2007, the U.S. Defense Department said that the Chinese military hacked into a Pentagon computer network.
It’s hard to tell exactly how much damage a hack into U.S. computers could do because the Pentagon isn’t exactly forthcoming with information on this. A plausible scenario would be a Chinese hacker gaining knowledge about U.S. troop movement. (A much less plausible scenario would be a teenage hacker who is looking for a game company accidentally, through a back door left by a programmer who left the project years ago, activates an AI which then seeks global thermonuclear war under the pretense that it cannot distinguish between a gamed scenario and reality.)
From a network monitoring and management perspective, AFCYBER will bring a whole new level of opportunities and challenges. How exactly do you monitor the United States network? What is the United States network? There are obviously some critical assets (White House, Pentagon, Capitol, etc.), but how many “cyber security holes” exist between critical infrastructure and those who want to attack critical infrastructure? Don’t we all share some connectivity medium at some level?
It gets even more interesting on the offense front. Are you confident enough in your network management/security monitoring tools to launch a missile attack on an offending host? False positives take on a whole new meaning.
If you have answers or insights, I’d love to hear them. Otherwise, I may never microwave again.