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Pentagon Cyberweapons Are Operational
The Pentagon is using cyberattacks to undermine Islamic State networks
Mar 3, 2016 Jen DiMascio Aviation Week & Space Technology
After years of speaking in vague terms about cyberwarfare, the Pentagon now openly acknowledges it is waging cyberwar in Syria.
'Cyber can be a tool that we can use against our enemy,' Defense Secretary Ash Carter recently told lawmakers. 'Right now . . . Cyber Command is operating against [the Islamic State group].'
Yet while officials are up front about waging warfare to undermine the so-called Islamic State's confidence in command-and-control and communications networks, officials remain circumspect about revealing too much about their methods.
'We want them to be surprised when we conduct cyberoperations,' says Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 'Frankly, they're going to experience some friction that's associated with us, and some friction that's just associated with the normal course of events in dealing in the information age. And frankly, we don't want them to know the difference.'
To support Cyber Command, the military services are staffing up their own cyberwarfare elements-and using them to battle the terrorist group in Syria.
While Pentagon officials are reluctant to talk about exact cyberwarfare capabilities, they are clear that the aim is to limit the group's ability to conduct command and control or communicate internally, undermining confidence in their networks-or to overload them so they cannot function. And while the precise approaches being used in Iraq and Syria may not show in other theaters, some of the techniques will.
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'What we are building is an inventory of tools that create capabilities that the combatant commanders can employ,' Dunford says. 'You can't replicate what we're doing today against [the Islamic State] in Iraq and Syria elsewhere in the world. What you can do is leverage the tools that have been developed for this particular operation, for other operations down the road.'
The Pentagon is certainly beefing up its cyberwarfare abilities. According to fiscal 2017 budget documents, it is planning to pump $6.7 billion into cyberspace operations, an increase of nearly $1 billion this year.
That includes programs that the Air Force does not discuss, such as the Network Attack System and Telephony Network Attack. The latter is suggestive of the type of cyberthreat the Department of Homeland Security warns against--the use of a high volume of calls to a telephone network to overwhelm it.
The Air Force alone is experiencing 30 million attacks on its networks per week and counting. As such, the service is declaring its cyberweapons systems operational.
Despite the programs' aggressive-sounding monikers, they are not weapons in the traditional sense. Rather, they are network defenses established in concentric circles-service officials equate them to the physical barriers that surrounded castles in days of old. Two weapons systems have been declared fully operational this year, and more will follow. The cyberweapons are used by the Air Force's cyberprotection teams, which work in tandem with Cyber Command's cybermission forces. Those teams work with commanders to determine where the weapon will be deployed, though it will always be inside an Air Force network.
The Air Force's 624th Operations Center is staffed by cyberwarriors and functions as a clearinghouse for information about networks the service is guarding. Credit: U.S. Air Force
The outer wall of defense, the perimeter, is established by the Air Force Intranet Control (Afinc) weapon system, the first cyberspace weapon declared fully operational. It contains 16 gateways to the Air Force's unclassified networks to screen out those millions of attacks launched each week.
For assaults that seep through those outer walls, the service has set up the Cyberspace Vulnerability Assessment/Hunter (CVA/H) weapon system. It enables the use of a mobile, modular platform from which to assess vulnerabilities and detect attacks. It includes the mobile interceptor platform, or MIP, a high-performance laptop that scans a network and collects traffic. The deployable interceptor platform is a sensor or camera placed in the network that the Air Force is defending. It connects to the MIP to show cyberwarriors what the network normally looks like.
Lt. Col. Greg McCulley, branch chief for defensive weapons operations in Air Force Space Command in the directorate of integrated operations, operates the CVA/H and the Air Force cyberspace defensive weapon system and conducts cyberspace defense analysis. He says that with that kind of deep stare into a network, he can identify which traffic is normal and which is abnormal.
The CVA/H platform also includes a garrison interceptor platform that collects a large set of data so long-term traffic and data analysis can be stored for a better picture of the network. And it contains an Information Operations Platform Flyaway Kit, with additional storage capacity if required; it can be positioned at the boundary near the gateway.
The cyberweapons are operated by units inside the 24th Air Force. The 624th Operations Center acts as a clearinghouse for information about the environment being monitored, so data flows in through subordinate units and back out from the 624th. If something is found amiss, the first step is to determine if it is an anomaly or was caused by something that is not configured correctly. Once a breach is found, it is coordinated with the operations center. Because the CVA/H operates inside the wall of Afinc, it is a subset of the larger set of traffic. There is a 'robust dialog' with those operating the CVA/H and with the airmen using the network.
Other cyberweapons, including the cyber command-and-control mission system-which fuses all data flowing in from operations units to build a picture of the entire network-are not yet fully operational. McCulley says they are working to staff units with enough airmen and hope the command-and-control mission system will be operational within a year.
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