CENTCOMs twitter and youtube accounts were hacked today. While the DoD gets yet another black eye, the optimist part of me hopes that these sites are actually honey pots designed to get more information on cyber attackers. The cynic in me believes that these are just promo sites that some PAO (public affairs officer) set up to make it seem like DoD is “hip.”
Whichever the case, it is clear that the battlefield is now as firmly in the digital realm as it is in the physical. The whole, “if it ain’t raining, it ain’t training” maxim is pretty much going by the wayside, unless you’re talking about a DDoS storm. Right now the Army admits that their state of modernization is in a “death spiral”. In some ways, that might not be a bad thing. High tech weapons become high tech targets, and it isn’t clear that we’re necessarily in the lead there. So maybe that non-networked “dumb” system isn’t so dumb after all. In a recent crowdsourcing exercise there was talk of carrier pigeons with SD cards. Just change that SD card to a written note and you’ve got something…