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List:       isn
Subject:    [ISN] Air Force cadets face hackers in cyberbattle
From:       InfoSec News <isn () c4i ! org>
Date:       2002-04-25 8:10:24
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http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/nation/3129029.htm

By JOHN DIEDRICH
The Gazette 
(Colorado Springs, Colo.)
Apr. 24, 2002

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. - The military's might increasingly depends on
computers, but that created a target for the enemy.

Air Force Academy cadets are finding out this week how hard it can be
to protect computers from bad guys.

They are playing defense against some of the best hackers: computer
experts from military and intelligence agencies.

It's the second annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a competition involving
the Air Force Academy, the Military Academy at West Point, the Naval
Academy, the Coast Guard Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Students at each school are being attacked by the professionals and
scored on how well they defend their systems. The competition began
Monday and ends Friday.

Computer defense is critical for the military, which has 2 1/2 million
computers and is finding the number of cyber attacks is exploding.

In 2000, there were more than 23,000 attempted attacks, but officials
refuse to say who was attacking. Last year, attacks jumped to more
than 41,000, said Army Maj. Barry Venable, spokesman for Colorado
Springs-based U.S. Space Command, which oversees computer defense.

Attacks are up, but the military has gotten better at defending their
systems, Venable said. "We have information superiority," he said.

In a classroom at the Air Force Academy, 20 cadets are learning how to
have that superiority. Two weeks ago they were given 13 computers and
told to build defenses for them.

The computers were typical of the computers sold to consumers, full of
holes that can be targeted by hackers to capture systems.

These computer science and computer engineering majors built such
defenses as firewalls and e-mail protections, and studied hacking
tools.

For many of the cadets in the exercise, it's the first time they have
applied their book knowledge to defending computers.

"It's raw experience you can't get in the classroom," Steven Norris, a
21-year-old senior, said Tuesday. "You have to make mistakes. It's
like a mechanic learning to fix a car in a book. You have to touch a
car."

Norris and some of his classmates spent five hours or more a day in
the lab this week, monitoring and responding to attacks by the "red
forces."

By late Tuesday, the aggressors successfully broke into one of the
cadets' systems, costing them points in the competition.

Cadet Jay Ford, 22, a senior, plans to fly jets, but he finds value in
the exercise.

"The problem is always there. Computer security needs to be a mindset,
not just a series of practices," he said.



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