UK to create new cyber defence force

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-24321717

by Henn • 13 years ago

29 33 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

nezumi• 13 years ago

Sort of off-topic, but does it bug anyone else that the militaries and governments of the world continue to refer to 'cyberspace' as if 'cyber-' was current Internet jargon? (Whereas in reality I only see it used for that other thing we are supposed to be making instead of war...)

DanBC3• 13 years ago

What other word would you use?

Cyber is pretty clearly defined among the people who use it. Other words are not.

forktheif• 13 years ago

Got to admit though, "cyber" sounds very 90s.

Now excuse me as I continue surfing the information super highway!

alexwright• 13 years ago

Cyber is pretty clearly defined among the people who use it. Other words are not.

Maybe the people using these terms (ie, people creating a "defence force" for the UK) should be more in touch with... more current lingo?

Sure would give them at least a vague sense of credibility if they called this something more like an internet/network orientated security... force.

On the otherhand, maybe these people having the massive tell of proclaiming "but this is CYBER." is a good thing? We know to dismiss what ever they're suggesting as uninformed and generally a terrible idea.

bostik• 13 years ago

What other word would you use?

Maybe not a single word, but "technology and information warfare"?

7952• 13 years ago

Non-geographic and abstract spaces defence force.

lttlrck• 13 years ago

Not really it's very well established and unambiguous.

ihsw3• 13 years ago

Cyberspace is distinctly separate from meatspace.

benologist• 13 years ago

If only there was a way to hack their vocabulary and disrupt the way they say things!

EliRivers4• 13 years ago

To be honest, they'll be lucky. I have some knowledge of the UK reserve forces, and right now there is a massive attempt to recruit as the government tries to switch its defence manning policy in a very, very short time. Unlike the US and Australia and various other modern forces (which have a much greater proportion of reserve forces), the UK has until very recently has a relatively small reserve forces. It's common in the US and other such for reserve forces to be part of the routine planning and deployment for operations; the UK has only recently been forced to think like this, principally due to the manning issues encountered in the Middle East over the last decade.

Fifteen years ago (maybe even ten years ago, depending on which reserve force one joined), you could join the UK reserve forces and the general feeling was that one could easily go a few decades without being mobilised; now, people are told on joining to expect to be mobilised - it's routine.

The US is a very warlike society, with a significant civilian buy-in to the idea of the armed forces and reserve forces. The UK, whilst as a nation just as busy travelling around the world to meet interesting people and shoot at them, does not have nearly such a civilian buy-in; there are already rumblings that reservists are just less attractive to employers on the grounds that they can be expected to disappear for nine months, and the employer is forced to hold their job open for them. This is clearly a big concern for the government, because they're trying to push the idea that employing a reservist brings advantages. Many employers seem... dubious that losing someone for nine months is worth the less tangible benefits.

Some reserve forces are being asked to increase on the order of 50% in about 5 years; given that in the UK it can take three years (and sometimes more - five years isn't unheard of; I understand that in some nations, reservists might spend several weeks or even months doing all the initial training in a single block; that simply won't work in the UK unless civilian attitude to reservists undergoes a massive change) to take a new reserve recruit and make them deployable (on the "trained strength" as the vernacular goes) this is one hell of a recruitment target.

The network infrastructure reservist branches are still in their infancy; in the British navy reserve, the branch is very, very new. They are still working out just what they're about. The kind of IT professional I anticipate they'll be trying to recruit will almost certainly feel a bit ripped off to be exercising their years of experience (for which, as contractors, they probably charge up to a hundred a day) on initial pay which, as I recall, is around 40 UKP a day, before tax etc. The initial basic training and militarisation can easily take a couple of years anyway, before they even start thinking about branching, so this might be something of a hard sell; "join us, and spend two years slogging around fields in the mud, and eventually we'll use your civilian skills at a much lower rate of pay than you get for them in your day job". Given that one of the main selling points of the reserve forces in the UK is that you get to do something a bit different, this is going to be a very hard sell.

walshemj4• 13 years ago

I thought it was civilian adjunct to the reserves part time Daniel Jacksons if you will - I am seriously considering volunteering for this.

EliRivers4• 13 years ago

Not that I know of, and I'd be awfully surprised if it was. The UK reserve forces really don't do that sort of thing. Even the very niche skills (neurosurgeons, specialists in obscure dialects, that sort of thing) aren't any kind of civilian under contract; they're in the reserve forces, like everybody else. How else would it work?

They need to be able to mobilise people at very short notice and deploy them anywhere in the world under military discipline for the best part of a year. It's no good if they can just say "Oh, I'm busy next week." (although the number of reservists who effectively do say just that when they get the call is astounding :p ) To fit into the military environment they'll need to have undergone the same basic reservist training as everyone else. Certainly in the naval reserve, it's just another branch, like all the others. If you joined the naval reserve for this, expect to go through the two years or so of navalisation and basic training first, like everybody else. There's also the legal aspect; if you're attacking another nation as part of a military effort, and you're not on the books as an official military combatant, what are you? A mercenary? A terrorist? War criminal? Whatever you are, you don't get the legal recognitions and protections that official armed forces get. As I understand it, part of the justification for not treating properly all those chaps wearing orange boiler suits in Cuba is that they weren't proper official military soldiers; if that's what happens to people who aren't official soldiers, I certainly wouldn't be interested!

I did once see someone recruited specifically for his ability to speak Arabic; he was rushed through as fast as they could and given special dispensation for some courses before being mobilised (took about a year from identifying him to giving him a pit in Baghdad, where he had some mutant officer rank because nobody quite knew what rank he should be) but he was in all legal respects just as much in the armed forces as all the other reservists being mobilised. Given that this information infrastructure operations branch is something the MOD are actually planning properly, they are not planning to have it as what you seem to think; essentially a bunch of phone numbers of civilians to ring and hope they don't mind leaving their life for a year at two weeks' notice.

Their civilian specialist team available for consultations and non-military deployment already exists; GCHQ.

ADDENDUM: All the above is based on my knowledge of how things ARE now, and how they HAVE BEEN in the past. The future is an unknown and hey, maybe the MOD does want a ragtag bunch of IT admin staff to partake in military operations.

roel_v• 13 years ago

"(for which, as contractors, they probably charge up to a hundred a day)"

I assume you mean here "£100 per hour"?

EliRivers4• 13 years ago

I really mean "charge whatever the bloody hell they feel like". I just let my fingers type the first thing they thought of :)

ris• 13 years ago

Gravy train nonsense.

belorn2• 13 years ago

While I hope that this force would focus their attention at serious crimes, nation's attacks against nations, and espionage, my inner cynic tells me that the primary target will be 16 year old kids who DDOS the web hosting company of a government website that happens to have been done by the lowest bidder.

Basically sending the army after the nation's own kids.

ihsw3• 13 years ago

Don't be naive, they'll be hacking into torrent websites in no time. The government is going to declare a variety of categories of targets that will be open game for sabotage and infiltration.

belorn2• 13 years ago

While that might be the future, I was more describing how things are today.

Just a week ago, one of the largest public transport companies in Sweden got hit by a DDOS attack. Their website, ticket system, and other areas was effected for several days. It was presented in the news as a major cyber attack, likely originating from organized crimes in countries far far away.

And then a website for 16 year olds "crackers" in Sweden came forth... I still see news articles lagging behind, still describing how government should deal with this "new" threat. All from secret police to anti-terrorist equipment, and I doubt that the military is that far behind in getting a piece of the increased budget pie.

spongle2• 13 years ago

This isn't going to work. I worked in the defence industry for a couple of years in an IT capacity and I'm not joking, the guys who run the shop don't know arse from elbow. Everything is run army style i.e. procedurally and non established procedures, even if they mitigate realistic threats aren't considered or accepted. They're that bad that still to this day, there are NT4 and exchange 5.5 deployments hanging around because some clueless fuck hasn't had orders to fix it.

What will happen here is they will create a team that will be written out of usefulness by procedure instantly and that is all.

tikums• 13 years ago

Any particular reason why they couldn't become as agile as IDF ISNU?

http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/tr/contents/articles/busines...

spongle2• 13 years ago

Yes. This was the ministry of defence which somehow manages to fuck everything up on a galactic scale. They really didn't have the talent to pull that off.

ihsw3• 13 years ago

One can only hope it's actually for defence, because there are already astronomical resources devoted to offence. Good defence requires clamping down all perimeter defences, and there are a lot.

If they can get defence into good shape then they'll have achieved something worth admiring.

In all likelihood the new military branch will focus on weaponizing zero-day exploits and licensing NSA's surveillance/analysis services, which is far less interesting.

amadeuspzs• 13 years ago

Good luck getting all the part-timers through DV!

EliRivers4• 13 years ago

Will they need DV? It's not like they'll be handling anything particularly secret. The reservist intelligence branches seem to have no problem getting all their people through DV, although it does take bloody ages.

PaulAJ• 13 years ago

Are they going to protect us from the NSA? What about GCHQ?

alexchamberlain• 13 years ago

I suspect they'll be under orders from GCHQ...

UK to create new cyber defence force

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