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But the
Northrop Grumman researchers are also well aware that the
issue has another dimension. "If you look at open source,
unclassified data on what potential adversaries are doing
in this area, it's hard to differentiate between military
and economic warfare," says Zavidniak. "If I am
an attacker with a mission," notes McCallam, "I
don't need conventional weaponry. I can attack the bank, the
power company, the warehouses where a grocery chain stores
its food, the credit and debit card systems." In a crisis,
with U.S. forces preparing to deploy forward, an attacker
could target telephone and air traffic control systems around
major bases. Military commanders could not reach their people
with deployment orders. Personnel would be less effective,
wondering whether their families would be able to find food
or when the power might be restored. Military flights might
be able to operate, but the chartered civil aircraft needed
to deploy key people could be mired in chaos.
When civilian
infrastructure becomes critical to the military's ability
to do its job, it may make sense to protect those systems
as well as those owned by the Pentagon. Zavidniak and others
believe that the concept of information resiliency and the
kind of tools being tested by Northrop Grumman and the Air
Force will eventually find their way into commercial systems,
but that some of the more advanced technical approaches will
remain exclusive to the military. The Central Intelligence
Agency's establishment of InQTel, a Silicon Valley venture
firm with the goal of adapting commercial technology to unique
government needs, is an example of such a government/commercial
partnership. Northrop Grumman, with a strong background in
government and industry solutions and its links to the closely
related world of electronic warfare, will be in a strong position
to compete in such an environment.
"To
confront this enemy we must tolerate intrusion-even welcome
it," says the Air Force's Taylor, "as a means to
discover, subvert, and aggressively respond. The intrusion-tolerant
battle management system is the first of a new generation
of technologies based on the notion of information resiliency-the
ability of a system to tolerate, dynamically reconfigure,
and repair itself in response to an attack."
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Northrop Grumman Corporation
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