Crossroads Blog | Institute National Security and Counterterrorism

Current Affairs, Cyber Exploitation, technology

Cyber Roundup (11/27): CyberCity, Cisco the Snake, Sequestration & Cyber, and more . . .

Busy night.

A quick survey of recent cyber news . . .

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Robert O’Harrow Jr. wrote a fascinating article for The Washington Post about cyber ranges.  Cyber ranges are virtual models designed to simulate the effects of cyberattacks; they harken back to the real world fake towns the U.S. military trains in to simulate urban combat.  The WashPo article focused on a cyber range called CyberCity, which “has all the makings of a regular town” including a coffee shop with free WiFi, a bank, a hospital, a train station, and a power plant.  The range allows U.S. military members to see how certain cyberattacks will affect CyberCity’s critical infrastructure and citizens.

The article goes into much greater depth on cyber ranges and their benefit to U.S. forces.  Definitely worth a look.

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Timothy Sample wrote for Aol Government and argued that the U.S. needs a cyber doctrine, now.  As opposed to the Cold War, where all sectors of the U.S. were “aligned under a Doctrine of Containment,” we currently lack a “collective sense of purpose for our national cyber defense that can be adopted by government agencies, armed forces, private sector organizations and individual citizens.”

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TechInAsia’s C. Custer on Chinese blowback to American concerns about Huawei.  Notably, a Chinese magazine “has run a front-page story about the security threat posted to China by Cisco and other US companies.”  The magazine’s cover shows a snake as the Cisco “s.”  The article also references U.S. companies as “American King Kongs.”

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In an unsurprising turn, Marcus Weisgerber reports for DefenseNews that a recent study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments concluded the Pentagon “should continue to invest in . . . offensive and defensive cyber capabilities . . . even as defense spending declines in the coming decade.”

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Politico’s Tony Romm on how cybersecurity spending will likely be saved if sequestration were to come to pass.

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David Dishneau (of the AP), via the San Francisco Chronicle, reports that Bradley Manning’s lawyers “made the case he’d already been punished enough when he was locked up alone in a small cell for nine months and forced to sleep naked for several nights.”  According to the article, that argument probably won’t work.

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Robert Lemos for Dark Reading on how DDOS attacks are beginning to use a one-two punch that has “broke the model that people had for stopping these things.”

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