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Cyberattacks threaten global security | ASU News


December 1, 2022

Director of US National Security Agency discusses cyber warfare at ASU event

The United States is engaged in a quiet but potentially devastating intelligence, cyber and information war, with the greatest threats to national security coming from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. 

That was the topic of a webinar on “Confronting Current and Future Cybersecurity Threats,” hosted Wednesday by Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War.

“As you think about what computers have evolved to these days, they’ve gotten so much more entwined in everything we do — whether it’s the information on our computer desktop all the way out to the military’s weapons,” said Rob Joyce, director of the U.S. National Security Agency’s cybersecurity directorate.

Part of the mission of the agency is to partner with allies, private industry and academics to strengthen awareness and collaboration, and advance the state of cybersecurity.

Joyce was joined by retired Lt. Gen. Robert Schmidle, professor of practice in the Center on the Future of War and School of Politics and Global Studies, and Daniel Rothenberg, a professor of practice in the School of Politics and Global Studies and co-director of the Center on the Future of War.

Rosenberg asked if a devastating and fundamentally destabilizing cyberattack is imminent and inevitable in American society.

“Yeah it is,” said Joyce, citing the 2021 ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline, which was caused by one compromised password that led to major fuel shortages.  

“So, it is not unimaginable.” 

Beyond government computers

A cyberattack on the U.S. government would be far-reaching, going beyond its official web of networks to thousands of partner companies, defense contractors, subcontractors and more.  

According to Joyce, the ecosystem consists of 30,000 cleared companies that work as subcontractors and 300,000 companies that feed into the defense department. It is an enormous amount of tech surface that adversaries can get into in order to steal information, manipulate data and more.

“So we were…

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Meet the ASU Hacking Club


‘Join in the journey to a perfectly hacked world’: ASU Hacking Club’s goal is to teach new hackers the basics of the subject

A person types on computer with an illustration of the pitchfork in binary code

A modest, brutalist website lights up the screen, reminiscent of a time when the internet was crafted by hand with simple code. While the word ‘hack’ is plastered all over the web page, a call to action sits at the bottom:

“To join the fray, get on our Discord. The invite has been embedded in your browser client. Find it.”

The ASU Hacking Club has been known by many names. Until most recently, the on-campus group was known as “pwndevils,” while those most “leet,” or elite, are also inducted into the more exclusive hacking team, “Shellphish.” 

Zion Leonahenahe Basque, president of the club and a Ph.D. student studying computer science — and undoubtedly a “leet” hacker — is a proponent for the club’s recent rebrand.

“The transition from pwndevils to the Hacking Club was a deliberate attempt to give us a different image to the public,” Basque said. “We wanted to completely redesign how people thought about our club on campus. We wanted to become this type of iconic, semi-exclusive, enigmatic hacking club.”

Basque, a Hawaii native, Laboratory of Security Engineering for Future Computing researcher and hardened Shellphish veteran, wants to be clear, however, that you don’t have to be an expert to join the club.

“I joined this club when I was a freshman at ASU. I had never done security stuff before,” Basque said. “Hacking is not about being the smartest…

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