In Homes With Children, Even Loaded Guns Are Often Left Unsecured
© Arin Yoon for The New York Times
© Arin Yoon for The New York Times
This is our second installment of The TIDE, which is your guide to all things Threat-Informed Defense—at least in terms of what my Adversary Intelligence Team works on and provides to our customers weekly. Last week I wrote about the work that the Tidal CTI team did around Moonstone Sleet and the law enforcement activity around DarkGate, SocGholish, and DiceLoader. From a defensive standpoint, Tidal released newly modeled products for our Enterprise users to model different solutions, ensuring they got a basic understanding of what their capabilities could do to help their MITRE ATT&CK® coverage.
The post The TIDE: Threat-Informed Defense Education (Qilin, RansomHub, BlackSuit) appeared first on Security Boulevard.
“Recruitment suffers because cyber operations are not a top priority for any of the services, and incentives for new recruits vary wildly. The services do not coordinate to ensure that trainees acquire a consistent set of skills or that their skills correspond to the roles they will ultimately fulfill at CYBERCOM.”Promotion systems often hold back skilled cyber personnel because the systems were designed to evaluate service members who operate on land, at sea, or in the air, not in cyberspace. Retention rates for qualified personnel are low because of inconsistent policies, institutional cultures that do not value cyber expertise, and insufficient opportunities for advanced training. “Resolving these issues requires the creation of a new independent armed service – a U.S. Cyber Force – alongside the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force.” The FDD report concluded, “America’s cyber force generation system is clearly broken. Fixing it demands nothing less than the establishment of an independent cyber service.”
© Jeff Chiu/Associated Press
Fascinating analysis of the use of drones on a modern battlefield—that is, Ukraine—and the inability of the US Air Force to react to this change.
The F-35A certainly remains an important platform for high-intensity conventional warfare. But the Air Force is planning to buy 1,763 of the aircraft, which will remain in service through the year 2070. These jets, which are wholly unsuited for countering proliferated low-cost enemy drones in the air littoral, present enormous opportunity costs for the service as a whole. In a set of comments posted on LinkedIn last month, defense analyst T.X. Hammes estimated the following. The delivered cost of a single F-35A is around $130 million, but buying and operating that plane throughout its lifecycle will cost at least $460 million. He estimated that a single Chinese Sunflower suicide drone costs about $30,000—so you could purchase 16,000 Sunflowers for the cost of one F-35A. And since the full mission capable rate of the F-35A has hovered around 50 percent in recent years, you need two to ensure that all missions can be completed—for an opportunity cost of 32,000 Sunflowers. As Hammes concluded, “Which do you think creates more problems for air defense?”
Ironically, the first service to respond decisively to the new contestation of the air littoral has been the U.S. Army. Its soldiers are directly threatened by lethal drones, as the Tower 22 attack demonstrated all too clearly. Quite unexpectedly, last month the Army cancelled its future reconnaissance helicopter which has already cost the service $2 billion—because fielding a costly manned reconnaissance aircraft no longer makes sense. Today, the same mission can be performed by far less expensive drones—without putting any pilots at risk. The Army also decided to retire its aging Shadow and Raven legacy drones, whose declining survivability and capabilities have rendered them obsolete, and announced a new rapid buy of 600 Coyote counter-drone drones in order to help protect its troops.