17D_guy

Sorry no AR info, but now they're part of Global Strike. So, not sure if that's changed the awesome culture the bros had over there. I hope not, seeing them hang/chat is the only time I wished I was a flier.

So, This seems like a well balanced article on something that's going on in Russia. Of course, we can't know what's really occurring; we can only speculate. But it is interesting 2 of the arrested have come from the FSB. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/wow-it-gets-bigger Of course the secret trials should help put everything to bed. another one - https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2017/01/26/report-arrested-russian-intel-officer-allegedly-spied-us/97094696/

Wow.. that's interesting. Also interesting is the reasons given. NY Times (ugh) has a good write up.

They only care about leaking classified data if it's against them political ends. Since Manning leaked against Dubya, and a war they didn't start (but sure carried on) - no harm, no foul. They also care about classified only as long as they can strip headers from documents/emails for a personal, insecure server. I really hope he's not considering a Snowden pardon...

As a kid I lived in Exmouth (which is the second red star above Learmonth) in the North West Cape. Would do again in a heartbeat.

Having spent a year in Best Korea, and now with their cult-president being impeached, the frat, rape and AAFES taking bribes little surprises me about that place. Me-guk probably doesn't want to pay what the Koreans are asking (plus the increase in the worldwide AAFES hiring quota). Philippines are a no-go. All we need is some DoD members getting shot and having crack sprinkled on them by a Durerte "anti-drug" gangs. Plus, who wants to live in a place with martial law? Outside of those 2 there are of course other options. There are requirements for massive infrastructure upgrades...they're just taking YEARS longer than planned because PACOM. EDIT - find it pretty interesting the AF managed to keep the serial rapist that was running around 2004-2006ish off Al Gore's internet. I can't find anything on it and my Airman's roommate was assaulted.

I guess I didn't communicate well. I've got no problem with it either. It's genius, and the Demo's were absolutely asleep at the wheel. It's local gov't, the way it should be. The NPR podcast goes into a little more detail about how the R's even had... public memos (not press releases, can't think of the term) announcing what they were doing. As a more conservative person, I'm fine with the way it happened. D's just assumed they'd always be in power, I guess. Even now they appear to be grasping at straws as to what led to the downfall.

Thanks for all the links, good reads/listens. Really? And they wonder why they can't even win the legislature back. Fixing/redoing the gerrymandering isn't going to overcome a complete out of step platform with the "fly-over" states. Republican's ability to win state houses to secure the federal legislature is breathtaking. NPR's fresh air had a good podcast on it. Other notes, I've always hated the smoke-fire line of reasoning and dismissed the whole thing with Russia holding kompromat on Trump. But then we find out Flynn had a holiday call with the Ruskies, where we're assured nothing political/sanction-related was discussed. Trump also keeps tweeting negatively about the IC. Also, there's interesting correlation between the non-IC dossier released on Trump and notable "deaths" in Russia of powerful information brokers. Additionally, the Panama Papers highlighting the shell-game of corporations and money movement (at least) of Russian oil companies aligning with some of the dossier numbers/offers. What's your thoughts on Trump's ties/non-ties with Russia or otherwise?

I kinda doubt it, but It's a possible issue: the comm heavy requirements/costs of running to droids PACOM areas may preclude basing there. We're having problems with other, less mission intense, programs getting up and running. Additionally, the political landscape is rough for getting that accomplished.

Follow-up - How many have Russian... Eastern European accents? I actually wonder this as well. The number of pol's who get caught up in women chasing.

Yep, I was wrong. Cheers.

I mean we can split hairs over it all you want, but feel free to read the article at some point. Plenty of WTF to go around, along with the assumption I'm a liberal who's going to blame Trump for everything. "Two military officials with knowledge of the situation said the Trump team decided to accept the resignation. A person close to the transition said transition officials wanted to keep Schwartz in the job for continuity, but the Army pushed to replace him.

Here's a WaPo link. Very... interesting decision. But I guess I shouldn't be shocked at anything with the incoming admin.

So, Rudy Giuliani is going to be Cyber Advisor to our new Czar President. Oh look, he runs a security consulting company. There's no way they'd leave a test page open to show config worked. Or tons of open ports that are easy to enumerate, crack and/or run Russian in.

I'm a privacy nut. Still I think we can work something out.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/11/politics/donald-trump-press-conference-highlights/index.html If nothing else, we'll get to see him back-pedal when finally presented with evidence repeatedly. Perhaps while pissing on prostitutes...and blame "the intelligence agencies" for the leak of a clearly commercial dossier. Or he just stops taking Intel Briefs again. Who knows. Strap in folks.

Are you in any of the "cyber" committees and/or test and evaluation/gov't oversight committees?

Then you've got wikileaks, who got called out hard in the report complaining about leaks... And their popular front trying to put together a "influence network" to identify those hostile to their efforts: The original, now deleted tweet, says "We are thinking of making an online database with all "verified" twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships." Influence Operations at their best. PEOTUS is a twitter nut, maybe he can beat them at their own game.

The unclass report is out - https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/press-releases/224-press-releases-2017/1466-odni-statement-on-declassified-intelligence-community-assessment-of-russian-activities-and-intentions-in-recent Sent from my Pixel using Baseops Network Forums mobile app

Exactly. Even the nomenclature for the names is the same: Air Office:Cyber Officer. There's much going on now that is akin to the struggles our early military aviation pioneers had within the community. Everyone wants cyber to turn off missiles mid-flight when that's just not possible--today. I hope we can avoid the "Strategic Daylight Bombing" type of pitfalls. You're talking about IT, which isn't Cyber. IT will move out of blue-suit support into a contract/DISA maintenance scheme. It's already happened with JIE and our migrations to JRSS. As Gen Bender said above that they view "maintenance" on the network as still Ops because that's how the domain exists, so you can't maintain it without operating on it. It's now causing serious issues because if I have an outage scheduled, and need to canx for base mission... is that a Cyber Ops failure? Or is that just CANX MX, reattempt at a later date? Some would/are saying it is an Ops Failure and we need to get C2 involved in it. Either way, in 5-10 years we'll be out of the IT business for the most part. I strongly disagree with Cyber as its own service. Because the enemy can always just unplug, and still fight. We will continue to bring capability, creating kinetic effects that kill bad-people, but I can't really see the value in spinning up a Cyber Corps...that'll just go and put people back on Army/Navy/AF bases to ensure the mission sets and/or DCO actions. Doesn't make sense to me, and the loss of choke-con for Mission Assurance wouldn't fly. Instead I forsee it being like AFSOC and JSOC. It's not going to be some huge separate-service. It needs to be small, agile and responsive to the services who operate in their individual areas within the physical domain. Cyber doesn't bring that type of strategic shift...yet. Perhaps in another decade, but I'll be an old(er)-head by then and cashing that check for life.

Here's the notes from Gen Bender's lunch chat I mentioned before. Please note these are his words mangled by my interpretation. Overall I found the time spent with him worth it, not a dog-phony show, and informative. I was also confident that the future of Cyber is at least vectored in a good-direction, despite my disagreements with some of where we're going.So the first was, "We're the best advanced Air Force of the Industrial Age." Which was echoed a couple times in other thoughts and comments as we ate and talked. Overall, he appeared to be getting at our ability to dominate Air and all aspects of it, but being ill-suited to continue to dominate Air as we struggle to get a grasp on Cyber. If we don't grasp how Cyber impacts Air Operations (ex. Maintainers utilizing web-enabled laptops to update maps, AOC NIPR/SIPR Access Points, ICS/SCADA systems overall, etc.) and make sure we've covered those attack-vectors, we're not going to succeed. Some of this can be seen in the Ukraine Artillery hack or not. "The days of the pilot on the pointy end being the only operator are old fashioned and over. We need a focus on teamwork because everyone is impacted by cyber, not just our Operators on the keyboards. On a football team--who's the operator?" This was a comment after a discussion about how we're going to differentiate between operators, maintainers and users of the AFNET. Gen Bender was not of the mind to spec out a separate Cyber Mx line (I am). Because if you're operating on the domain for Mx, that's still operations. He doesn't want someone to think of the domain as Air, and we "hop off" the domain to do Mx. Cyber can't allow that mindset. Interesting thought, not sure I agree.There was a good discussion about a technical track for Cyber Officers and Gen Bender said it's something he's taking back to the CSAF. Because the retention problem is going to be very different from the pilot one (pays, privileges, smaller outside hire opportunities) and the specifics required are more specialized. So a pilot can spend an assignment getting spun up on an airframe, and stay within that airframe. But we don't' have any of that in Cyber and taking someone from ICS/SCADA systems and throwing them into Router Exploitation is very different from F16->F15 or even F-16->Drone. (Note - please correct me if I'm wrong in this assumption.) It was also pointed out that we can't just have a cadre of technical experts at the O1-O4 level and have no one moving up the chain to advocate for capes and resources. It appeared lost on my fellow O's, but it's a good point.There was also some discussion about AFSPC as the home for Cyber. Because cyber has to be fast and that is not AFSPC. They'll spend decades on a project and it's ok, because: rockets, satellites, and the void. They fail one launch, at that's a cool $2B instantly gone. But if we spend 2 years on a cyber project, it's already outdated and we're behind. 3 years to POM for a project? GTFO (my words, obviously). He said he brought that up to the CSAF/SecAF, but as we're AFSPC now it's where we've got to work. But it's in the whole cyber mind that AFSPC isn't working out, and the efficiency wasn't as good as expected.I didn't take notes on this, but he spoke at length about the culture change and really needing to work on that and make sure we get it right. Which means bringing the right people in and getting the training right. On training, "...right now we're taking in new Airman and treating them like they've got no idea how tech works. Everyone starts at baseline zero with no regard for previous experience." He did say they're developing a test to judge aptitude for cyber capabilities, similar to the TBAS. Training for us is a realy problem. Our training pipeline is not responsive, nor does it address the AF's needs beyond warm body. I can't take a Airman out of tech school and get them prepared to start working in our operational units sooner than a year. There's topics that aren't even covered in school (ex. virtualization) because AETC doesn't want to pony up the cash for equip. Additionally, the on-going training is woefully out of date. On culture it's more about making sure that as we push towards ops that we get it right. If we can get more of you guys into cyber to educate our oncoming senior leaders (and me) about what real ops is, that would be great. EDIT - Forgot this one. He also spoke about how we're doing applications and software. Specifically mentioned the dog-shit(my words) software USAFA is using for their student actions. How he approached SalesForce about possibly utilizing their applications and got push back from corporate AF asking what experience that commercial developer had running large university management. Turns out SalesForce support a ton of universities, enough to have a dedicated portion of their site for it. Also, costs less than $100 per student.

I guess we can call that questioning the official story. It's more a discussion about the impact of Iraqi WMD on the current IC situation. Still waiting for Trump to drop that info on us about what he knows on the hacking.

Good thoughts. I'd like some articles reading/sources for point 1 if you can link them. I've yet to read anything, outside of political malarkey, that says Russia was not the culprit for these hacks. Note: the professional commercial cyber corps (which is a lot former AF/DoD-cyber dudes) are saying, and have been saying out loud for awhile, that the Russians are in everything. What motive do they have to say otherwise in relation to this hack? Concur on all. Again, I think it was this limp-dick foreign policy coming back to bite them in the ass at the worst possible time for them. That coupled with things getting worse and worse for not responding to Russian escalations (re: harassing diplomats, Crimea, etc) and an incoming President who appears to be infatuated with Russia spurred Obama to respond now. Additionally, I think our slow-roll of anything Cyber (orgs, forces, systems, IT system updates, etc.) has caused great consternation within the Administration. While I try to give my leadership the benefit-of-the-doubt always, I also think this JRA might be pressure on the DoD to speed up getting Cyber to where the admin wanted it a year ago. Unfortunately we've got the US Code thing to work through, which I think is going to be heavily modified as we move into real Cyber Ops.

I wasn't familiar with his talk, gave it a listen. Good stuff, but his chat with us at the "front line" was more focused on his philosophies for where we're at and where we'll be going. I didn't take notes through the whole thing, only items I found interesting. I've got them at work, so I'll try to post later this week once I return.