Tag Archives: defense

Drones and the US Air Force

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/03/drones-and-the-us-air-force.html

Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change.

The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, which will remain in service through the year 2070. These jets, which are wholly unsuited for countering proliferated low-cost enemy drones in the air littoral, present enormous opportunity costs for the service as a whole. In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn last month, defense analyst T.X. Hammes estimated the following. The delivered cost of a single F-35A is around $130 million, but buying and operating that plane throughout its lifecycle will cost at least $460 million. He estimated that a single Chinese Sunflower suicide drone costs about $30,000—so you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A. And since the full mission capable rate of the F-35A has hovered around 50 percent in recent years, you need two to ensure that all missions can be completed—for an opportunity cost of 32,000 Sunflowers. As Hammes concluded, “Which do you think creates more problems for air defense?”

Ironically, the first service to respond decisively to the new contestation of the air littoral has been the U.S. Army. Its soldiers are directly threatened by lethal drones, as the Tower 22 attack demonstrated all too clearly. Quite unexpectedly, last month the Army cancelled its future reconnaissance helicopter ­ which has already cost the service $2 billion—because fielding a costly manned reconnaissance aircraft no longer makes sense. Today, the same mission can be performed by far less expensive drones—without putting any pilots at risk. The Army also decided to retire its aging Shadow and Raven legacy drones, whose declining survivability and capabilities have rendered them obsolete, and announced a new rapid buy of 600 Coyote counter-drone drones in order to help protect its troops.

Cyberwar Lessons from the War in Ukraine

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/02/cyberwar-lessons-from-the-war-in-ukraine.html

The Aspen Institute has published a good analysis of the successes, failures, and absences of cyberattacks as part of the current war in Ukraine: “The Cyber Defense Assistance Imperative ­ Lessons from Ukraine.”

Its conclusion:

Cyber defense assistance in Ukraine is working. The Ukrainian government and Ukrainian critical infrastructure organizations have better defended themselves and achieved higher levels of resiliency due to the efforts of CDAC and many others. But this is not the end of the road—the ability to provide cyber defense assistance will be important in the future. As a result, it is timely to assess how to provide organized, effective cyber defense assistance to safeguard the post-war order from potential aggressors.

The conflict in Ukraine is resetting the table across the globe for geopolitics and international security. The US and its allies have an imperative to strengthen the capabilities necessary to deter and respond to aggression that is ever more present in cyberspace. Lessons learned from the ad hoc conduct of cyber defense assistance in Ukraine can be institutionalized and scaled to provide new approaches and tools for preventing and managing cyber conflicts going forward.

I am often asked why where weren’t more successful cyberattacks by Russia against Ukraine. I generally give four reasons: (1) Cyberattacks are more effective in the “grey zone” between peace and war, and there are better alternatives once the shooting and bombing starts. (2) Setting these attacks up takes time, and Putin was secretive about his plans. (3) Putin was concerned about attacks spilling outside the war zone, and affecting other countries. (4) Ukrainian defenses were good, aided by other countries and companies. This paper gives a fifth reasons: they were technically successful, but keeping them out of the news made them operationally unsuccessful.

US Critical Infrastructure Companies Will Have to Report When They Are Hacked

Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/03/us-critical-infrastructure-companies-will-have-to-report-when-they-are-hacked.html

This will be law soon:

Companies critical to U.S. national interests will now have to report when they’re hacked or they pay ransomware, according to new rules approved by Congress.

[…]

The reporting requirement legislation was approved by the House and the Senate on Thursday and is expected to be signed into law by President Joe Biden soon. It requires any entity that’s considered part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, which includes the finance, transportation and energy sectors, to report any “substantial cyber incident” to the government within three days and any ransomware payment made within 24 hours.

Even better would be if they had to report it to the public.

Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Ping Identity launch the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project

Post Syndicated from Matthew Prince original https://blog.cloudflare.com/announcing-critical-infrastructure-defense/

Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Ping Identity launch the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project

Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Ping Identity launch the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project

Today, in partnership with CrowdStrike and Ping Identity, Cloudflare is launching the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project (CriticalInfrastructureDefense.org). The Project was born out of conversations with cybersecurity and government experts concerned about potential retaliation to the sanctions that resulted from the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

In particular, there is a fear that critical United States infrastructure will be targeted with cyber attacks. While these attacks may target any industry, the experts we consulted with were particularly concerned about three areas that were often underprepared and could cause significant disruption: hospitals, energy, and water.

To help address that need, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Ping Identity have committed under the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project to offer a broad suite of our products for free for at least the next four months to any United States-based hospital, or energy or water utility. You can learn more at: www.CriticalInfrastructureDefense.org.

We are not powerless against hackers. Organizations that have adopted a Zero Trust approach to security have been successful at mitigating even determined attacks. There are three core components to any Zero Trust security approach: 1) Network Security, 2) Endpoint Security; and 3) Identity.

Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Ping Identity launch the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project

Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Ping Identity are three of the leading Zero Trust security companies securing each of these components. Cloudflare’s Zero Trust network security offers a broad set of services that organizations can easily implement to ensure their connections are protected no matter where users access the network. CrowdStrike provides a broad set of end point security services to ensure that laptops, phones, and servers are not compromised. And Ping Identity provides identity solutions, including multi-factor authentication, that are foundational to any organization’s posture.

Each of us is great at what we do on our own. Together, we provide an integrated solution that is unrivaled and proven to stand up to even the most sophisticated nation state cyber attacks.

And this is what we think is required, because the current threat is significantly higher than what we have seen since any of our companies was founded. We all built our companies relying on the nation’s infrastructure, and we believe it is incumbent on us to provide our technology in order to protect that infrastructure when it is threatened. For this period of heightened risk, we are all providing our services at no cost to organizations in these most vulnerable sectors.

We’ve also worked together to ensure our products function in harmony and are easy to implement. We don’t want short-staffed IT teams, long requisition processes, or limited budgets to stand in the way of getting the protection that’s needed in place immediately. We’ve taken a cue from hospitals to triage the risks through a recommended list showing organizations that may be short of IT staff how they can proceed: suggesting what they should prioritize over the next day, over the next week, and over the next month.

You can download the recommended security triage program here. We know that not every organization will be able to implement every recommendation. But every step you get through on the list will help your organization be incrementally better prepared for whatever is to come.

Our teams are also committed to working directly with organizations in these sectors to make onboarding as quick and painless as possible. We will onboard customers under this project with the same level of service as if they were our largest paying customers. We believe it is our duty to help ensure that the nation’s critical infrastructure remains online and available through this challenging time.

We anticipate that, based on what we learn over the days ahead, the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project may expand to additional sectors and countries. We hope the predictions of retaliatory cyberattacks don’t come true. But, if they do, we know our solutions can mitigate the risk, and we stand ready to fully deploy them to protect our most critical infrastructure.

Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, and Ping Identity launch the Critical Infrastructure Defense Project

10 additional AWS services authorized at DoD Impact Level 6 for the AWS Secret Region

Post Syndicated from Tyler Harding original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/10-additional-aws-services-authorized-dod-impact-level-6-for-aws-secret-region/

The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has authorized 10 additional AWS services in the AWS Secret Region for production workloads at the Department of Defense (DoD) Impact Level (IL) 6 under the DoD’s Cloud Computing Security Requirements Guide (DoD CC SRG). With this authorization at DoD IL 6, DoD Mission Owners can process classified and mission critical workloads for National Security Systems in the AWS Secret Region. The AWS Secret Region is available to the Department of Defense on the AWS’s GSA IT Multiple Award Schedule.

AWS successfully completed an independent evaluation by members of the Intelligence Community (IC) that confirmed AWS effectively implemented 859 security controls using applicable criteria from NIST SP 800-53 Rev 4, the DoD CC SRG, and the Committee on National Security Systems Instruction No. 1253 at the Moderate Confidentiality, Moderate Integrity, and Moderate Availability impact levels.

The 10 AWS services newly authorized by DISA at IL 6 provide additional choices for DoD Mission Owners to use the capabilities of the AWS Cloud in service areas such as compute and storage, management and developer tools, analytics, and networking. With the addition of these 10 newly authorized AWS services (listed with links below), AWS expands the capabilities for DoD Mission Owners to use a total of 36 services and features.

Compute and Storage:

Management and Developer Tools:

  • AWS Personal Health Dashboard: Monitor, manage, and optimize your AWS environment with a personalized view into the performance and availability of the AWS services underlying your AWS resources.
  • AWS Systems Manager: Automatically collect software inventory, apply OS patches, create system images, configure Windows and Linux operating systems, and seamlessly bridge your existing infrastructure with AWS.
  • AWS CodeDeploy: A fully managed deployment service that automates software deployments to a variety of compute services such as Amazon EC2, AWS Lambda, and on-premises servers.

Analytics:

  • AWS Data Pipeline: Reliably process and move data between different AWS compute and storage services, as well as on-premises data sources, at specified intervals.

Networking:

  • AWS PrivateLink: Use secure private connectivity between Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC), AWS services, and on-premises applications on the AWS network, and eliminate the exposure of data to the public internet.
  • AWS Transit Gateway: Easily connect Amazon VPC, AWS accounts, and on-premises networks to a single gateway.
Figure 1: 10 additional AWS services authorized at DoD Impact Level 6

Figure 1: 10 additional AWS services authorized at DoD Impact Level 6

Newly authorized AWS services and features at DoD Impact Level 6

  1. Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR)
  2. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS)
  3. AWS CodeDeploy
  4. AWS Data Pipeline
  5. AWS Lambda
  6. AWS Personal Health Dashboard
  7. AWS PrivateLink
  8. AWS Snowball Edge
  9. AWS Systems Manager
  10. AWS Transit Gateway

Existing authorized AWS services and features at DoD Impact Level 6

  1. Amazon CloudWatch
  2. Amazon DynamoDB (DDB)
  3. Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS)
  4. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
  5. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Auto Scaling
  6. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – Elastic Load Balancing (ELB) (Classic and Application Load Balancer)
  7. Amazon ElastiCache
  8. Amazon Kinesis Data Streams
  9. Amazon Redshift
  10. Amazon S3 Glacier
  11. Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)
  12. Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
  13. Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)
  14. Amazon Simple Workflow (SWF)
  15. Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)
  16. AWS CloudFormation
  17. AWS CloudTrail
  18. AWS Config
  19. AWS Database Migration Service (DMS)
  20. AWS Direct Connect (Dx)
  21. AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
  22. AWS Key Management Service (KMS)
  23. Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) (including MariaDB, MySQL, Oracle, Postgres, and SQL Server)
  24. AWS Snowball
  25. AWS Step Functions
  26. AWS Trusted Advisor

To learn more about AWS solutions for DoD, please see our AWS solution offerings. Follow the AWS Security Blog for future updates on our Services in Scope by Compliance Program page. If you have feedback about this post, let us know in the Comments section below.

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Author

Tyler Harding

Tyler is the DoD Compliance Program Manager within AWS Security Assurance. He has over 20 years of experience providing information security solutions to federal civilian, DoD, and intelligence agencies.