US military and intelligence computer networks (2015)

https://www.electrospaces.net/2015/03/us-military-and-intelligence-computer.html

by DyslexicAtheist • 6 years ago

95 26 6 years ago

electrospaces.net

atemerev• 6 years ago

https://intelink.gov is a gateway to some of these.

pdevr• 6 years ago

Wow.

1. The non-www version doesn't seem to work.

2. If you try https://www.intelink.gov/, the browser immediately warns you that the site is not secure, because of certificate problems.

3. If you still dare to venture ahead, you are greeted with this: "This is a United States Government computer system. This computer system, including all related equipment, networks, and network devices, including Internet access, are provided only for authorized U.S. Government use. U.S. Government computer systems may be monitored for all lawful purposes, including ensuring that their use is authorized, for management of the system, to facilitate protection against unauthorized access, and to verify security procedures, survivability, and operational security. Monitoring includes authorized attacks by authorized U.S. Government entities to test or verify the security of this system. During monitoring, information may be examined, recorded, copied, and used for authorized purposes. All information including personal information, placed on or sent over this system may be monitored."

I am out of here :-)

vonmoltke• 6 years ago

1. The non-www version doesn't seem to work.

Common for "internal" USG sites. I don't know if it's intentional.

2. If you try https://www.intelink.gov/, the browser immediately warns you that the site is not secure, because of certificate problems.

Internal USG sites use USG-generated root certificates and certificate chains. These need to be installed manually from USG sources.

3. If you still dare to venture ahead, you are greeted with this: "This is a United States Government computer system. This computer system, including all related equipment, networks, and network devices, including Internet access, are provided only for authorized U.S. Government use. U.S. Government computer systems may be monitored for all lawful purposes, including ensuring that their use is authorized, for management of the system, to facilitate protection against unauthorized access, and to verify security procedures, survivability, and operational security. Monitoring includes authorized attacks by authorized U.S. Government entities to test or verify the security of this system. During monitoring, information may be examined, recorded, copied, and used for authorized purposes. All information including personal information, placed on or sent over this system may be monitored."

The standard disclaimer on all internal and classified systems. I'm glad I no longer have to click through that daily.

ianmf• 6 years ago

3.

These banners are required on all government IT systems. The sole purpose of these banners is to prevent criminals from saying they were not aware of what they were doing, mistakenly accessed the site, etc. It is a legality.

Pick-A-Hill20192• 6 years ago

Then it's just as well you didn't scroll down to the comments section of tfa that links to a blog page called "Dangerous I.P. addresses that you should never ever scan" (https://dangerousip.blogspot.com/)

ckozlowski• 6 years ago

You need the DoD Root CAs.

You can get them from here, just follow the instructions: https://public.cyber.mil/pki-pke/end-users/getting-started/

They're not bad to have in general.

The notice you see there is standard boilerplate.

antiman0• 6 years ago

What a great rabbit hole! It's pretty interesting to see how some of these sites are "protected" (big HTML warning stating "DO NOT ACCESS THIS") and some oldschool-IT named domains such as https://itdashboard.gov/ .

Given the recent SolarWinds breach I wonder how these networks are impacted. Most of them look like from the early 90s.

sitzkrieg• 6 years ago

PKI, not username/password

sandworm1012• 6 years ago

> Given the recent SolarWinds breach I wonder how these networks are impacted.

Classified military networks are very different than civilian networks. They aren't just air-gapped. Because they are not general purpose networks they can have lots of internal barriers that would not be acceptable outside of the military. Want to use HDMI for your new screen? Nope. VGA because it doesn't require compute power within the screen. Want to use a Bluetooth headset? Nope. You are stuck with a curly wire from 1972 because that wire has passed the emissions security inspections. Such principals extend to the internal barriers too. Important national security websites can look like personal websites from the 1990s not because they are not updated but because they are very restricted in how they can load information from other sources. The fact that these networks look old doesn't mean they are behind the curve on security.

Got too many passwords to remember? Want a "password manager"... lol. Good luck with that in a world where computer A isn't even allowed to be in the same room as computer B.

euler_angles• 6 years ago

We aren't allowed to use VGA because it's vulnerable to being sniffed. Everything has to be hdmi or display port/mini display port

alksjdalkj• 6 years ago

Those HTML banners aren't intended to "protect" anything, they just indicate what classification level the content is.

kube-system• 6 years ago

Sensitive networks are airgapped because vulns like solarwinds are not unforeseeable.

hchz• 6 years ago

I saw a topological diagram of how each of these systems and many not mentioned were connected to each other, and it raised more questions than it answered.

US military and intelligence computer networks (2015)

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