Gadgetory

another inject now reload reload what is the future of cyberattacks and what's the military doing about it we visited West Point the Army's prestigious 200 year old military academy to watch the annual cyber defense exercise dubbed CDX a yearly competition among service academies to see which teams can protect their servers from NSA hackers people are starting to realize that we built all these things that we're not relying on but we sort of built it out in front of the idea of security and so things are kind of getting away from us and now we need to take some time to kind of Ratchet it back in and figure how we're going to manage this really complex world we build the West Point team spent months creating a server that could handle email file transfers and other services for thousands of simulated users for several days the group of two dozen cadets huddled together in a computer lab to guard their systems against exploits from the NSA cyber is the new frontier always learning new things always developing new things and being able to protect something that's so important in our everyday life is definitely crucial a scoreboard was projected in the front showing how well army was faring against competing teams with grades based on how well each group maintains its network naturally the army team streamed their activities live on Twitch the top team takes home this big shiny trophy this year though Army's big rival Navy one we're also here to visit the army cyber Institute which is a new think tank here that asks all the different questions about what the future of cyber defense may look like we met its director Colonel Andrew o hall he talked about the Army's efforts to predict potential ways the country could face an attack a concept called threat casting now that internet connections are just about everywhere with threat casting you're trying to put yourself into what the attack surface would look like in 10 years because we know the attack surface is going to be huge he went on to describe a series of potential cyber threats we may face in the future such as a personal care robot being hacked and harming its owner or a hack on a dam that causes a catastrophic disaster Pulse think tank is also considering the potential of some pretty sci-fi concepts like augmented soldiers and autonomous drones one of the main efforts we've been doing is trying to figure out how the army will bring cyber and cyber effects to the battlefield I don't know if it's terrifying or comforting that high-level army officials are thinking about robot attacks and Bionic soldiers ensure cyber attacks may worsen but efforts like these should help the military prepare a little more for what's coming