
Eligible Receiver: NSA’s successful 1997 hack of the U.S. military - secfirstmd
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/03/inside_the_nsa_s_shockingly_successful_simulated_hack_of_the_u_s_military.single.html
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dsl
This was my favorite part, and a good lesson for every startup. Skip over all
the overrated recent Stanford grads and Box alumni, _THIS_ is the guy you want
to hire:

"Only one person in the entire Department of Defense, a technical officer in a
Marine unit in the Pacific, responded to the attack in an effective manner:
seeing that something odd was happening with the computer server, he pulled it
offline at his own initiative."

~~~
Afforess
Absolutely, and bravo to the officer. If you are ever unsure, pull the plug.
The safest computer is one turned off.

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theoh
I'm not sure that was implied. He could have used ifconfig.

Now that you mention it, though, I thought of an apparently notorious scene
from NCIS: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc-
FuE41kZU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc-FuE41kZU)

~~~
dfc
You think your computer might be compromised but you still trust your binaries
and OS to operate as intended?

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theoh
No.

~~~
dfc
So probably not ifconfig...

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mariodiana
The most telling part, for me, is here:

> Everyone in the room was stunned, not least John Hamre, who had been sworn
> in as deputy secretary of defense at the end of July. Before then, Hamre had
> been the Pentagon’s comptroller, where he’d gone on a warpath to slash the
> military budget, especially the part secretly earmarked for the NSA. Through
> the 1980s, as a staffer for the Congressional Budget Office and the Senate
> Armed Services Committee, Hamre had grown to distrust the NSA: It was a
> dodgy outfit, way too covert, floating in the gray area between “military”
> and “intelligence” and evading the strictures on both. Hamre didn’t know
> anything about information warfare, and he didn’t care.

I say, bravo to the NSA for uncovering the vulnerability. But, the cynic in my
wonders how long anyone over there had suspected this, but never acted on it
until faced with the threat of having feed pulled from the trough. My
prejudices lead me to think of government as tending towards the
dysfunctional. So, I worry if the same sort of thing isn't going on right now.

~~~
mjevans
That's surely a part of the US government that is in dire need of more checks
and balances.

Another even more telling thing revealed in this article; the very end where
they realize that /no one/ is 'in charge' of fixing this. (Arguably because
they ALL are. This is all what should be general OpSec training!)

~~~
jessaustin
Profiles in "leadership"...

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jackgavigan
The unmentioned background to Eligible Receiver is that the previous summer,
the National Security Studies Quarterly published a paper by Eric Sterner
entitled _Digital Pearl Harbor: National Security in the Information Age_.

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nxzero
Curious thing to me is at what point do you switch from saying this was a test
to this is the real thing; meaning that you task the NSA to hack someone, then
blame it on for example North Korea, China, etc.

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jessaustin
It's possible we've already seen this with the Sony hack. Even if the loudest
adherents to this theory have been somewhat discredited this year, nothing
produced by Mr. Fart et al. contradicts it in convincing fashion.

