The "If I were a terrorist" parlor game is out of fashion these days, but who ever knew the Department of Defense to follow trends? "It's a whole different thing -- that we haven't done much of -- to red-team how an adversary might use [information technology] and hackers" to attack the U.S. power grid, said John Young, the Pentagon's director of defense research and engineering recently. Improving DoD's ability to anticipate terrorist threats to its communications systems, Young said, would be among his top priorities in putting together the department's 2008 budget request.
Officials at the DoD are particularly concerned about the extensive "reachback links" between military planners stateside and forward deployed troops. Such would make tempting targets to hackers who would get a double prize of overcoming America's IT security while also possibly endangering troops at the same time. In addition, the ubiquity of small power sources and high performance sensors makes it likely that security could be compromised from unlikely areas by a terrorist breaching a DoD network by wirelessly hijacking an infantryman's network connection.
Other DoD initiatives for 2008 include:
-read more in this Military.com report