Cybersecurity in today's armed forces

11             The theme for my blog is/was cyber-security in the military.   I chose this theme for two reasons.   One, having experienced first-hand the efforts on the part of the military against cyber-threats, I found it intriguing.      Not to mention the fact that around the time we were establishing blogs there were two maritime collisions involving Naval warships.   And two, I wanted to explore the viability of the efforts being made to protect military networks, and examine for correlations between the collisions and any possible criminal activity by external actors seeking to cause dissention amongst the ranks.   My blog contains an eclectic mix of cyber-security related stories to those that have the potential to impact not only members of the military, but the private sector as well.   Also, my week 9 blog post was one of the more enjoyable posts to write having benefited from a similar program that allowed me to certify as CompTia Security +.   Without these types o

10             Given this week’s lesson on Intrusion Detection Systems I thought it apt to discuss military testing of such systems.   In my research, I came across a paper written by Terrence Champion, a research scientist at the Air Force INFOSEC Research Lab in Hanscom, MA, and Robert Durst, a former Air Force security programmer turned research scientist for SenCom supporting the AFRL.   These two gentlemen are nothing more than pioneers in the way that military began testing IDS’s in the late nineties.   With the help of UC Santa Barbara, they were able to develop a test bed in which to test and analyze some of the early ID systems that were being introduced.   Their test bed consisted of a virtual network which simulated the complexities of a MAN and through the utilization of software, used to assign arbitrary source protocol addresses to individual sessions, were able to recreate the type of traffic “patterns” of a much larger network.   This process was vital to the tes