Pentagon Cyber Attacks

US Cyber Command’s Plan X: Pentagon Launching Covert Cyber AttacksBy Tom Burghardt


La presente revisión de Tom Burghardt colmará de orgullo patrio a muchos estadounidenses. Están a la vanguardia, no hay dudas posibles. Pero tal vez otros ciudadanos piensen que sus impuestos irían mejor a planes de atención sanitaria. Lo cierto es que parte de las guerras actuales se libran en el ciberespacio o con tecnologías punteras del sector. Que cuestan mucho dinero.  Pero que generan avances tecnológicos. La industria armamentística es el mejor negocio global posible. Propicia soluciones que luego se expanden al mercado civil. Es decir, que tienen su aspecto positivo. Claro, corramos un velo sobre las bajas colaterales, el destino de los refugiados de los países asolados por guerras de rapiña, las epidemias de hambre, endémicas en algunos países africanos. Esos discursos se tachan de populistas. Si les parece entren en la URL correspondiente y decidan.

Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-cyber-commands-plan-x-pentagon-launching-covert-cyber-attacks/5352627


"In 2008, the Armed Forces Journal published a prescient piece by Colonel Charles W. Williamson III, a staff judge advocate with the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, the National Security Agency listening post focused on intercepting communications from Latin America, the Middle East and Europe.
Titled “Carpet bombing in cyberspace,” Col. Williamson wrote that “America needs a network that can project power by building an af.milrobot network (botnet) that can direct such massive amounts of traffic to target computers that they can no longer communicate and become no more useful to our adversaries than hunks of metal and plastic. America needs the ability to carpet bomb in cyberspace to create the deterrent we lack.”
While Williamson’s treatise was fanciful (a DDoS attack can’t bring down an opponent’s military forces, or for that matter a society’s infrastructure), he had hit upon a theme which Air Force researchers had been working towards since the 1980s: the development of software-based weapons that can be “fired” at an adversary, potentially as lethal as a bomb dropped from 30,000 feet.
Two years later, evidence emerged that US and Israeli code warriors did something far more damaging.
Rather than deploying an “af.mil” botnet against Iran’s civilian nuclear infrastructure at Natanz, they unleashed a destructive digital worm, Stuxnet. In the largest and most sophisticated attack to date, more than 1,000 centrifuges were sent spinning out of control, “no more useful” to Iranian physicists “than hunks of metal and plastic.”
A line had been crossed, and by the time security experts sorted things out, they learned that Stuxnet and its cousins, Duqu, Flame and Gauss, were the most complex pieces of malware ever designed, the opening salvo in the cyberwar that has long-guided the fevered dreams of Pentagon planners.
Plan X’
Today, that destructive capability exists under the umbrella of US Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), one which has the potential of holding the world hostage.
Last year the Pentagon allocated $80 million dollars to defense giant Lockheed Martin for ongoing work on the National Cyber Range (NCR), a top secret facility that designs and tests attack tools for the government.
Under terms of the five year contract, Lockheed Martin and niche malware developers have completed work on a test-bed housed in a “specially architected sensitive compartmented information facility with appropriate security protocols” that “emulates the public internet and other networks, and provides for the modeling of cyber attacks.”
Originally developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s geek squad, NCR has gone live and was transitioned last year to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, federal contracts uncovered by NextGov revealed.
As Antifascist Calling reported back in 2009, “NCR will potentially serve as a new and improved means to bring America’s rivals to their knees. Imagine the capacity for death and destruction implicit in a tool that can . . . cause an adversary’s chemical plant to suddenly release methyl isocynate (the Bhopal effect) on a sleeping city, or a nuclear power plant to go supercritical, releasing tens of billions of curies of radioactive death into the atmosphere?”
NextGov also reported that the “Pentagon is seeking technology to coordinate and bolster cyberattack capabilities through a funding experiment called ‘Plan X,’ contract documents indicate.”