Information Operations
Newsletter
Compiled by: Mr. Jeff Harley
US Army Strategic Command
G39, Information Operations Division
Table of Contents
ARSTRAT IO Newsletter on OSS.net
Table of Contents
Vol. 9, no. 07 (30 January – 10 March 2009)
1. NATO’s Cyber Defence Warriors
2. CAC-CDID Completes Transition to Objective Model
3. Electronic Warfare Proponent: Changes by Adversaries, Advances in Technology Drive EW's Operational Importance
4. Army Creates Electronic Warfare Career Field
5. Tinker Airmen Deploy With Bomb-Jamming Radio Device
6. Wireless Electricity Is Here (Seriously)
7. German Federal Armed Forces Develop Secret Cyberwar Troop
8. Der CyberKrieg
9. National Defense in Cyberspace
10. U.S. Spy Agency May Get More Cybersecurity Duties
11. New Cyber-Threats -- Part 1
12. Northrop Grumman Begins Study of Electronic Warfare System of the Future
13. Tactical Success, Strategic Defeat
14. Tactical Success, Strategic Defeat (Updated)
15. Taking the “D’oh!” Out of Operational Security
16. Colonies of 'Cybots' May Defend Government Networks
17. America's Wired Warrior
18. Behind The Estonia Cyberattacks
19. Do Journalists Make Good Public Affairs Officers?
20. Army Developing Teams for Electronic Warfare
21. Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age, Part 2
NATO’s Cyber Defence Warriors
By Frank Gardner, BBC News, 3 February 2009
Nato officials have told the BBC their computers are under constant attack from organisations and individuals bent on trying to hack into their secrets.
The attacks keep coming despite the establishment of a co-ordinated cyber defence policy with a quick-reaction cyber team on permanent standby.
The cyber defence policy was set up after a wave of cyber attacks on Nato member Estonia in 2007, and more recent attacks on Georgia - so what are they defending against and how do they do it?
Tower of Babel
Nato's operational headquarters in Mons is a low, drab three-storey building - part of a sprawling complex set in rolling farmland south of Brussels.
The blue and white flag of the 26-nation alliance flutters in the cold breeze alongside the spangled banner of the EU.
Inside the canteen it is like a Tower of Babel with almost every language of Europe competing to be heard above the clatter of trays and dishes.
Our escort, a German army officer in immaculate uniform, leads us down a corridor to a hushed room where 20 or so military analysts sit hunched over computers; their desert boots and camouflage fatigues strangely out of place for a windowless room in Belgium.
This, explains Chris Evis, is the Incident Management Section, which he heads.
"We face the full gamut of threats. It varies from your kiddie who's just trying to gain street cred amongst his friends to say he's just defaced a Nato system to more focused targeted attacks against Nato information".
Cyber attacks are not new - websites were being hacked into and brought down during the Kosovo war 10 years ago.
But when Estonia came under sustained cyber attack from Russian sympathisers in 2007, the alliance realised it needed a proper cyber defence policy and fast.
Suleyman Anil, a Turkish IT expert from the Nato Security Office is the man driving much of that policy.
"Estonia was the first time, in a large scale, [that we saw] possible involvement of state agencies; that the cyber attack can bring down a complete national service, banking, media... the other particular trait everyone is struggling to deal with... is lots of cyber espionage going on".
Mr Anil reveals that there has been more than one incidence of Nato officials being socially profiled, and then subjected to "targeted trojans".
He explains how their unseen adversaries gather as much information as possible about the individual then send them an email purporting to come from a friend or a relative.
Trojan horse
If they open the attachment then a sophisticated "worm" or "trojan" can, in theory, take over their computer, scan its files, send them on, delete them, or perhaps most damagingly, alter them without the user knowing.
This sort of activity goes on every day in the commercial world but for a military organisation like Nato there are obvious risks.
Chris Evis is at pains to point out that any material classified as "secret" is transmitted only internally, by secure intranet, rather than using the world wide web.
But what happens, I ask, when someone mistakenly sends secret material over the internet?
The answer, it seems, is sitting in the corner of the room.
An Italian sergeant, who looks young enough to still be at school, is painstakingly scanning emails that have been automatically quarantined because they contain buzzwords like "Nato secret".
A glance over his shoulder reveals emails to and from Sarajevo, Baghdad and Kabul, evidence of Nato's newly expanded horizons.
They look innocuous enough and most of the time, explains the sergeant, it is a false alarm but sometimes even quite senior officers have transgressed and they get a serious talking to about online security.
Serious threats
When it comes to cyber espionage, Nato officials refuse to say who they think is behind the attacks, in fact our escorts can hardly wait to steer us off the subject.
Even if they were certain that they were originating, say, in China or Russia, it would be very hard for them to prove, so tortuous is the trail in cyberspace.
Instead, Chris Evis is happy to talk about how the threat is being tackled, explaining that they have a number of analysts who are constantly reviewing information, looking for the more serious threats.
"We have [about] 100 sensors at the moment deployed at something close to 30 different sites across the Nato countries... one of these sensors could be on the east coast of the United States, one could be in London, one could be in Iraq and a number of them could be in Afghanistan. All that information is simultaneously feeding back to us at the centre here."
So is cyber warfare the future of warfare?
Chris Evis says he believes it will be a factor within any future conflict.
"I think the gravest cyber threat to Nato is somebody altering the data without our knowing about it and [our] finding out too late in the action," he says.
"So when it's quiet it's probably too quiet, because there's always activity out there."
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CAC-CDID Completes Transition to Objective Model
By Christopher L. Kessel, Capability Development Integration Directorate, Leavenworth Lamp, 5 February 2009
A little less than one year after the Combined Arms Center commanding general approved its formation, the Combined Arms Center - Capability Development Integration Directorate completed the final steps on Feb. 1 to transition to the objective CDID model. This last organizational adjustment will bring to a close eleven months of hard work and patience as CAC-CDID has not only accomplished its mission tasks, but also managed the dissolution and establishment of several major CAC organizations.
Late February of last year the CAC commander approved the formation of the CAC-CDID as a major subordinate organization. CDID's establishment was part of the broader CAC restructuring effort that created organizations such as the CAC-Knowledge, CAC-Training and CAC-Leadership Development and Education.
In the area of capability development, the problem was far from novel: how do you balance an increasing reliance on combined arms capability development with decreasing or minimal resources? The solution, as indicated above, was to adopt the Training and Doctrine Command approved CDID model. This new model reduces redundant efforts by providing a central location for capability development.
Previously, there were several different CAC organizations that developed capabilities - including the Force Management Directorate, Battle Command Integration Directorate, U.S. Army Computer Network Operations Electronic Warfare Proponent and U.S. Army Information Operations Proponent - but their efforts were disjointed. A centralized location for capability development ensures CAC's development efforts are synchronized across the combined arms spectrum and the doctrine, organization, training, materiel, leader development, personnel and facilities domains. And while these organizations have been dissolved, their missions continue within the CAC-CDID construct.
It is within this new construct that CAC-CDID manages the development and integration of CAC proponent responsibilities in the areas of information, battle command, computer network operations and electronic warfare, to name a few. These CAC proponent responsibilities are now efficiently developed within CDID's Concept, Requirement, Experimentation and Warfighter Interface, commonly known by the acronym TRADOC Capabilities Manager, or TCM, model.
Recently what these efforts have translated into is a way ahead for an Electronic Warfare Career Field, the publication of Field Manual 3-36, Electronic Warfare in Operations, Feb. 26; FM 3-13, Information, later this year; and exercises involving Security Force Assistance. These efforts are of no small significance. FM 3-13, Information, addresses the paradigmatic shift of FM 3-0, Operations, that information "is as important as lethal action in determining the outcome of operations." Additionally, the SFA exercises involve more than a hundred participants from various commands throughout the United States, as well as multinational partners from Canada, United Kingdom and Australia.
CAC-CDID is looking ahead to its responsibilities under the new structure. Thomas Jordan, who has directed the organization from its planning to execution phases, is confident about the future and the benefits of the TRADOC CDID model.
"The TRADOC CDID model has been adopted by other Centers of Excellence and has shown promise," Jordan said. "Without a doubt, this will increase the effectiveness and efficiency of CAC's, and thereby TRADOC and the Army's, combined arms development efforts."
To find out more information about CAC-CDID, visit CAC's Web site at http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/.
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Electronic Warfare Proponent: Changes by Adversaries, Advances in Technology Drive EW's Operational Importance
By George Marsec, Leavenworth Lamp, 5 February 2009
Electronic warfare has been around since there have been electronics. Hollywood movies have painted society's historical view of EW with the good guys intercepting the bad guys' radio signals and each side trying to jam each other's radar systems. Today's EW reality is far more technologically complex and constantly evolving.
The job of providing doctrinal structure to the U.S. Army for all things EW rests on the shoulders of the U.S. Army Computer Network Operations and Electronic Warfare Proponent at Fort Leavenworth.
EW is "our (the U.S. Army) ability to use the electromagnetic spectrum and also to affect our enemies' ability to use the electromagnetic spectrum by either attacking their ability or denying their ability through the electromagnetic spectrum," said Lt. Col. John Bircher, USACEWP deputy director for Futures,
A key component of the USACEWP's doctrinal guidance is Field Manual 3-36, Electronic Warfare in Operations, due for release in late February.
USACEWP Director Col. Wayne Parks said FM 3-36 is the Army's first keystone EW document of its kind. Previous EW doctrine was localized to divisions and "corps and above" or was technically oriented. The new doctrine is the first effort to build an overarching concept of EW operations that is nested in overall operational Army doctrine as described in FM 3-0, Operations.
The USACEWP was born in 2006 after several years of changes and advances on the EW front.
"From 2003-2005 we started to see our adversaries using the spectrum against us in ways we never predicted," Bircher said. "Radio controlled IEDs, cellular communications, the Internet ... all using the electromagnetic spectrum in ways we weren't prepared to deal with.
"In 2006, the Department of the Army authorized the formation of the EW Proponent," Bircher said, "taking the responsibility of electronic warfare for ground forces out of the Information Operations arena."
In 2007 DA authorized the merging of the Computer Network Operations function with the EW and formed what is now the USACEWP. The joining of the two disciplines grew from the Army's increasing need to understand, operate in and manipulate cyberspace.
"In the operational environment, the lines between CNO and EW are blurred," Bircher said. "We can use EW to disable our enemies' cellular phone device or we can use CNO to deny the device's access to its network."
"Do we use CNO or EW to deny our adversary, and does it matter to the tactical commander?" Bircher continued, "and in our conceptual research we found that it didn't matter. What's important is controlling the data, the bandwidth and the electromagnetic spectrum."
Staying on the leading edge of cyber communications technology is a daunting task, for not only the USACEWP but for communications professionals across both military and civilian organizations. To keep up with the latest, the proponent has reached out to form partnerships with other leading communications entities.
Parks said the USACEWP took a big step toward cementing these partnerships when they hosted an information and cyberspace symposium in September.
"The symposium was successful in leveraging the expertise and perspectives from subject matter experts across the joint, interagency, and intergovernmental communities as well as academia and industry," he said.
Some key participants in the symposium included representatives from Big-12 universities and major telecommunications firms. Parks said the relationships formed with these partners give the USACEWP the luxury of "articulating our concepts and bouncing them off of our partners, and vice-versa. The relationships work both ways."
USACEWP will continue to lead the Army's CNO and EW doctrine and development, but soon will have a new look and a new name.
According to a Combined Arms Center - Capability Development Integration Directorate release, "The USACEWP will transition to the TRADOC Capabilities Manager Computer Network Operations Electronic Warfare on Feb. 1 due to CAC-CDID's internal refinement. This refinement will distribute CNO and EW expertise, previously restricted to just the USACEWP, throughout the entire CAC-CDID organization, thus making the overall development process more efficient."
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Army Creates Electronic Warfare Career Field
By Jamie Findlater, Army News Service, 6 February 2009
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Feb. 6, 2009) -- The Army has announced approval for the establishment of a new Electronic Warfare 29-series career field for officers, warrant officers and enlisted personnel.
The new career field will eventually give the Army the largest electronic warfare manpower force of all the services. Nearly 1,600 EW personnel, serving at every level of command, will be added to the Army over the next three years. The Army is also considering adding an additional 2,300 personnel to the career field in the near future as personnel become available, officials said.