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GCN Home > 04/30/07 issue

Network warfare

NSA gives military students lesson in cyberdefense

By William Jackson, GCN Staff

Deep within the bowels of a Lockheed Martin building in Hanover, Md., a group of trained security experts do their best to penetrate the networks of five military academies. And they don’t mind being mocked.

Which is exactly what the Air Force Academy is doing at the moment. The network administrators have posted a taunting Web page from academy cadets: a photo of a crying baby along with a caption that accuses their attackers of being no more than script kiddies, an insult of no little weight to security professionals.

One of the administrators looks at the picture and laughs. “What they don’t know,” he says, “is that we still have a back door in their system that they haven’t found.”

Welcome to the seventh annual Cyber Defense Exercise (CDX), a National Security Agency event in which computer science students at the nation’s service academies go head-to-head with a hand-picked group of malicious-minded security experts called the Red Team.

At stake was the coveted NSA Information Assurance Director’s Trophy — won last year for the second time by the Air Force Academy — and a lot of pride.

“They are hungry to win,” said Maj. Damon Becknell, who teaches information assurance at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

West Point issued the first CDX challenge in 2001 and won the contest the first two years but has not been able to regain the trophy since 2002. This year, 26 West Point cadets went all out to get back on top.

“We’re treating this like an Army mission,” said Rock Stevens, cadet commander of the CDX team. “We’re soldiering on the Internet.”

There is more involved than bragging rights. The exercise is the capstone for information assurance classes at West Point; the Air Force Academy in Boulder, Col.; the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md.; the Coast Guard Academy at New London, Conn.; and the Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y. It provides a dose of real-world experience to go with their classroom training.

More news on related topics: Communications / Networks, IT Security, Defense IT, IT Management



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