On the Digital Battlefield

An interesting piece ($) from Aviation Week on electronic warfare quotes BAE executive Rance Walleston on where the industry looks for talent:

“That’s because some of the best developers of attack tools are hackers that play around in the commercial environment,” Walleston says. “A standing industry joke is that we can’t hire the next batch of people because they’re not on parole yet.”

Walleston explains:

“Terrorists, nation-states and the U.S. government have something in common,” says Walleston. “They all shop at Best Buy [an electronics and appliances chain store], so that makes it critical that we understand the vulnerabilities of the [commercial] infrastructure we rely on.”

And nobody understands that commercial infrastructure as well as the people who go to jail for hacking it (except of course the ones that don’t end up in jail). The piece describes a mobile “network laboratory” built by BAE to probe for weaknesses and try out new methods of electronic attack against the latest communications technologies. It’s pretty cool stuff, but while our guys are practicing against the netwok lab, the Chinese are hacking into “anything and everything” the Department of Defense has online. So will a war with China be determined by which country has the best hackers?

On the Digital Battlefield

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