Cyber war: network vulnerabilities worry pentagon.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: CYBER SECURITY

U.S. military leaders will say the nation's ground forces are the best in the world. The Air Force will tout its air superiority, and the Navy, its ability to rule the seas.

But ask Pentagon officials about the Defense Department's global communications network, and they'll call it its weakest link.

While the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan can be seen on the nightly news, there are unseen battles being waged in cyberspace. It's a war being fought by hackers, worms, net bots and cyber-terrorists. It's a fight taking place in nanoseconds, 24 hours a day, and the attacks can be launched from anywhere in the world.

The U.S. military is comfortable facing enemies on traditional battlefields, but facing them in the virtual world is a new challenge, said Army Brig. Gen. Susan Lawrence, Joint Staff chief information officer and director of command, control, communications and computers. Until the military figures out how to defeat its adversaries in this battle space, "we're not going to win the global war on terrorism," she said at a military communications conference.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Robert Shea, director of command, control, communications and computer systems on the Joint Staff, said at the conference that "the network is our center of gravity, and our ability to defend it is our Achilles' heel."

Army Col. Carl Hunt, director of technology for the joint task force for global network operations, said those who attack the Pentagon's network are often "a half step ahead of us."

"We've gone to great lengths to build complementary capabilities in the kinetic battlefield," but not in the virtual battlefield, he told military writers at a briefing. "We have a very thin, fragile communications capability basically in the global information grid and the Internet."

Tom Kellerman, chief knowledge officer with the consulting firm, Cybrinth LLC, said the Internet threats come from different sources. Some are cyber-terrorists, others are criminal syndicates, and there are nation-states involved, as well.

North Korea supports a "hacker university," where students learn to penetrate networks. In 2003, South Korean networks suffered a 450 percent jump in attacks that were believed to be originating from the north, Kellerman said.

The Defense Department's 2005 annual congressional report, "The Military Power of the People's Republic of China," said the People's Liberation Army sees computer network operations as critical means to seizing the initiative...