NSA vs. Military Academies
May 12th, 2008Via: Wired:
Even with a solid network design and passable software choices, there was an element of intuitiveness required to defend against the NSA, especially once it became clear the agency was using minor, and perhaps somewhat obvious, attacks to screen for sneakier, more serious ones.
“One of the challenges was when they see a scan, deciding if this is it, or if it’s a cover,” says Dean. Spotting “cover” attacks meant thinking like the NSA — something Dean says the cadets did quite well. “I was surprised at their creativity.”
Legal limitations were a surprising obstacle to a realistic exercise. Ideally, the teams would be allowed to attack other schools’ networks while also defending their own. But only the NSA, with its arsenal of waivers, loopholes, special authorizations (and heaven knows what else) is allowed to take down a U.S. network.
And despite the relative sophistication of the NSA’s assaults, the agency told Wired.com that it had tailored its attacks to be just “a little too hard for the strongest undergraduate team to deal with, so that we could distinguish the strongest teams from the weaker ones.”
In other words, grasshopper, nice work — but the NSA is capable of much craftier network take-downs.
