The Threat

Module 2

The Lesson

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• Identify the IW threats to DoD's information infrastructure and, in a broader sense, America's data networks.
• Address some of the sociological implications of an IW attack.

You must consider the various perspectives of IW threats:

What is DoD's concern?

After all, internal Continental United States (CONUS) policy is not it's concern...

Or is it?

There is a shared responsibility between managing DoD and commercial networks.

Why is DoD concerned?

DoD uses closed systems, router and firewall protection, and encryption in order to secure critical networks and message traffic; however, these secured transmissions ride on the public switched network, which has been proven to be vulnerable to IW attacks.

The enemy is turf blind. It does not worry about what is DoD or Public.

Information Warfare does not equal Computer Warfare.

Computer Warfare (CyberWar) is a subset of Information Warfare.

Many aspects of IW can be waged without the use of the computer. Take, for example, Somalia.

Threat Model

The following is a model that you can trace through for responding to IW threats.

Summary

Hopefully the case studies have illustrated that there are a variety of IW threats possible.

Here are the important points to this module:

• IW is not restricted to the technical world. Remember Somalia?
• In the past, links were the primary targets to exploit, while links and nodes were targets for denial and destruction. This is classic C2W.
• In the this new world, nodes and information are the primary targets for hackers and foreign intel.
• Now you have two new concerns: radical groups and commercial off the shelf software (COTS).

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