In the early 1990s, NSA Director Mike McConnell created a brand-new position at the National Security Agency: Director of Information Warfare. McConnell appointed Rich Wilhelm, with whom McConnell had worked closely on U.S. counter-command & -control intelligence operations during the first Iraq war. After just a few weeks settling into his new job, Wilhelm walked into Director McConnell’s office and said “Mike, we’re kind of f***ed here.”
The problem? The U.S. could penetrate and disrupt foreign adversaries’ increasingly computerized military, government, and civic infrastructures, and it was already clear that future conflicts would turn upon what would only later be dubbed cyber warfare. But whatever we could do to our adversaries, they could do to us. Making matters worse, the U.S. military, civilian governmental agencies, and private businesses were rapidly connecting everything in computer networks, with no meaningful attention paid to network security. We’d be throwing rocks from the largest glass house on the planet.
In Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan adroitly distills over one hundred key player interviews – from U.S. cabinet secretaries, generals, admirals, and NSA directors, to analysts, aides, and officers in the trenches – into a riveting narrative that tracks the debut, developments, and dilemmas of cyber warfare.
Kaplan’s book is a cyber roller coaster ride spanning three decades. Here are some notable highs and lows: Continue Reading The TAO of Cyber Warfare: Dark Territory
At last!!! A good reason not to create dozens of hard-to-remember passwords! The updated 
Late last month in 
A swarm of zombies, led by Byte Walkers, surges inexorably onward to penetrate a massive perimeter wall by force and stealth. Sounds like Game of Thrones, right? Instead, this is our cyberthreat reality. And in an ironic twist that would make George R. R. Martin blush under his beard, it’s now painfully real for 
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember a time when businesses actually kept their own information (cue my adult children to roll their eyes). How quaint. We no longer keep most of our information – providers do that for us. We store our data in the cloud, through cloud providers. We outsource business applications to SaaS providers, and even entire systems as PaaS. And we increasingly use service providers to handle key aspects of our business that we used operate internally, resulting in a robust flow of data out of our businesses to such providers, and also the providers generating, receiving, and retaining huge data troves on our behalf.
Hurricane season is in full swing. As I write this, Tropical Storm Emily is drenching Florida, and the governor has declared a state of emergency. Having lived in Florida myself, I know that most coastal residents do take hurricanes seriously. There are always those, however, who either don’t grasp the possibility that if a hurricane hits they can suffer real damage, or simply play the odds that it won’t happen to them. Hurricane readiness for them is a bottle of Cuervo Reserva and some DVDs for entertainment in case the power goes out. And so, too, it goes with data breaches.
The hand-wringing continues about robots, and for whose jobs they’re coming next. But the “robots” needn’t be tangible to transform our lives. Actually, they’re already here, in the form of big data algorithms – predictive mathematical models fueled by astounding computing power and endless supplies of data.
WiFi provider Purple recently added a “
bage in, garbage out” – we know that already, right? Well … what we know about information quality and what we do are not always in sync. Just for kicks, consider information quality through the lens of the industrial quality movement.
Many years ago, before common sense kicked in, I thought it would be a good idea to rent a storage space for all the extra furniture and other stuff I could not fit in my new house. Knowing it would only be temporary, I stashed everything from upholstered and leather furniture, to boxes of books. Fast forward twelve months. The rental agreement was expiring, and I realized that I would never need nor have room for all that I’d stored, so I decided to have a sale to dispose of it. When I went to the storage space I was horrified to see that everything was covered in a thin film of mold. (This was years before climate-controlled storage was widely available.) I had no choice but to trash it all, which both cost me money and prevented me from converting my goods to profit.