An army of tech-savvy warriors has been fighting its battles in cyberspace

2010-09-27 07:08

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/23/AR2010092303000.html By Ellen Nakashima Washington Post Staff Writer September 23, 2010 They were Air Force fighter pilots, Army rangers and Marine tank commanders. There was even a Navy fighter jet radar officer who had been taken prisoner during the Persian Gulf War. Warriors all. But in 1998 they fought in a different realm - their weapons bits and bytes, their foxholes temperature-controlled computer operations rooms. In the new battleground of cyberspace, they battled shadowy foes whose computer attacks were given names like Moonlight Maze and Titan Rain. These were the men and women of the Joint Task Force Computer Network Defense, 24 tech-savvy war fighters who were part of the pioneering group tasked with protecting the Pentagon's computer networks - vital for everything from directing troop movements to passing intelligence to issuing commands to fire missiles. To the surprise and approval of the group's first leaders, the task force has not only endured, it has evolved into what is today the U.S. Cyber Command, arguably the world's most potent computer network fighting force. The recently launched Cyber Command is much larger, with about 1,000 personnel, and with authority not only to defend, but to attack adversaries. It will leverage the abilities of the National Security Agency to penetrate foreign networks and spy on targets. [...] _______________________________________________________ Subscribe to InfoSec News - www.infosecnews.org http://www.infosecnews.org/mailman/listinfo/isn

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/23/AR2010092303000.html

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