e-warfare

Again, Elliot of the Whig-Standard brings some interesting information about CF activities to the fore. Complimenting him on his work is getting to be a disturbingly frequent habit of mine; I'm not used to a denizen of the MSM putting together such consistently decent pieces (and now that I've said that, I can hear my former bunk-mate's head swelling up from here).

This one happens to be about and electronic warfare exercise involving a team from RMC and a bunch of cyber-spooks from the legendary NSA:

The signals school at CFB Kingston established a million-dollar electronic battlefield simulator for its students last year.

Eight other teams across North America, ranging from the U. S. army, naval and air force academies to the U. S. Coast Guard and merchant marine academies are fielding teams in the same exercise, each with the same task -- to assume the network of an imaginary country, somewhat neglected and long unpatched, and keep it running while fending off the best efforts of the NSA hackers to compromise it.

The exercise gives students a controlled environment in which to view an attack, improve their analysis and response skills and allows them to see the potential consequences of weak network security.

...

"What haven't they done to us?" Wolfman asked rhetorically, his eyes rarely leaving a computer screen displaying evidence of attacks and probing by the Amer ican spies.

"They broke in and defaced our web page yesterday, we've caught them trying to download our databases, they did some social engineering by breaking the passwords of cadets at other schools and sending us e-mails pretending to be them and asking us to take down our firewall because they couldn't get into the site -- they've been keeping us busy."

The stand-off nature of much of today's warfare makes non-kinetic exercises such as this one all that much more important.

And hey, if it all goes horribly wrong, you can always just go scorched-circuit-board on them (ht:JMH):

This week at an arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., defense researchers are testing a new high-power microwave (HPM) bomb—one that creates an electromagnetic pulse capable of disabling electronics, vehicles, guided missiles, and communications while leaving people and structures unharmed. The tests mark the first time such a device has been shrunk to dimensions that could make it portable enough to fit in a missile or carried in a Humvee or unmanned aerial vehicle.

Microwave weapons have been sought for decades, but the problem until now has been the portability issue. The bomb to be tested, developed at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, with U.S. Army funding, is a 1.5-meter cylinder with a diameter of about 15 centimeters. These dimensions were the most difficult of the three metrics the Army asked Texas Tech to meet, according to Larry Altgilbers, Texas Tech’s contract monitor and an engineer at the U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command (USAMDC), in Huntsville. The bomb also had to operate under its own power and, of course, generate lots of microwaves.

“It’s a big deal” that an HPM bomb has been shrunk to this size, says Edl Schamiloglu, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of New Mexico and a noted expert in the field of high-power microwave sources. The military would be able to actually use these.”

Oh, yes: my online adversaries are definitely trembling at this development...BWAAHAHAAA!