Tag Archive for: force

How the Air Force is tackling electronic warfare challenges — FCW

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Defense

How the Air Force is tackling electronic warfare challenges

  • By Lauren C. Williams
  • Sep 23, 2021

concept image of radio communication (DARPA) 

The Air Force is on high alert when it comes to electromagnetic spectrum threats. But extensive system updates pose a risk.

“If we lose the war in the spectrum, we lose the war in the air and we lose it quickly,” Gen. Mark Kelly, the commander of Air Combat Command, said during keynote remarks at the Air Force Association’s Air, Space, and Cyber conference Sept. 22, noting that a peer adversarial fight would engage frequencies across the spectrum.

Kelly’s comments come a month after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed out the classified implementation plan for the Electromagnetic Spectrum Strategy released last year.

The Air Force, in recent years, has made organizational changes to elevate the importance of electronic warfare, including moving the Air Force Spectrum Management Office into its Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Cyber Effects Operations (A2/6) branch under Lt. Gen. Mary O’Brien. That branch will also soon be home to the Air Force’s EMS directorate in October, O’Brien said Sept. 22.

“This is key terrain. We have to connect our joint force,” Kelly said during his presentation of the Air Force’s fighter roadmap, “because if the adversary can break our network, or if we can never establish a network, they can break our blue kill chains and potentially break our force.”

Kelly told reporters Sept. 22 that electronic warfare upgrades, such as with the Eagle Passive Active Warning Survivability System, were “major surgery” that could take F-15s out of commission for several months.

“That system requires a significant amount of power and cooling to be pulled off the engines to power it,” Kelly said. “The number of panels and amount of plumbing they pull out of that airplane to get their hands to the area they need to go is major surgery.”

The solution to keep pace with EMS threats, according to Gerald Gerace, Leidos’ chief scientist for its electronic warfare…

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Northern Ontario police force recovering from ransomware attack

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A Northern Ontario police force is still trying to recover from a ransomware attack last week.

Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., police put out a statement today saying its 911 service was not affected, nor was its online reporting system for less urgent crimes. “At no time was our ability to respond to calls for service compromised,” the statement said.

However, the force’s email service isn’t available. It has not said whether its police dispatch or records systems were impacted.

The statement said the force became aware of the ransomware attack on Thursday, August 26th, and added, “Information Technology staff are working through the attack to regain access to affected systems.”

Government departments and services such as police forces are considered by some attackers to be prime targets on the assumption they are more likely to pay a ransom because they provide critical infrastructure services.

Earlier this year those behind the ransomware attack on the Washington, D.C. police force threatened to release copied personal data on police officers and informants unless a US$4 million ransom was paid. The department offered $100,000, which was reportedly refused. After that extensive profiles of 22 officers including their Social Security numbers and dates of birth were published, possibly putting them at risk.

Ransomware gangs operate at two levels: Some are wholly-contained operations, while others run ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS)operations, where affiliate members actually do the targeting and hacking. Some cybersecurity vendors report RaaS gangs have lately become nervous as their affiliates target high-profile targets — such as hospitals and pipelines — which are more likely to attract hostile public reaction and combined attention of law enforcement.

For example, after attacking the U.S. Colonial Pipeline — which resulted in the pipeline being temporarily shut down and creating long lines at East Coast gas stations — the web servers of the Darkside ransomware group were seized, as well as its payment server. It is assumed the U.S. had something to do with that.

Subsequently the Darkside group apparently re-emerged calling itself BlackMatter. It listed a number of…

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Electronic Warfare System On Air Force F-16 Gets Software Update In Flight

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However, the system can only do that if the threat in question is one that it knows how to categorize based on the information in its internal database. Beyond the issue of dealing with previously unknown signal types, that library of information could also have a hard time identifying known signals that are being sent out a novel way or are simply muddled together with other emissions. That’s why this new remote updating capability, which the Air Force says began as “a bar-napkin idea,” is so important. “This proof-of-concept test demonstrated the ability for a pilot to properly correlate a previously unknown electronic threat in near real-time,” according to the Air Force.

“We believe this is the first time a fighter aircraft has received a software update and gained new capability all while in flight,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Zachary Probst, the commander of the 84th Test and Evaluation Squadron, said in a statement about the test. “This is a big deal. There’s a tactical need to be able to rapidly update software, especially mission data files because that’s what ties into our ability to identify, find, and defend ourselves against enemy threat systems.”

It’s hard to overstate how significant this new capability could be. Potential adversaries, including possible near-peer opponents, such as China and Russia, are constantly developing new air defense systems and associated sensors, as well as electronic warfare and cyber warfare capabilities. Some of those systems are then made available for export, though often with somewhat reduced functionality. 

Altogether, it is not hard to imagine a scenario in which U.S. combat aircraft would fly into combat and be faced with previously unseen or otherwise little understood air defense and electronic warfare threats that existing countermeasures systems are not immediately capable of responding to. That’s where Cognitive EW comes in. 

One envisioned near-term capability that is part of this broader concept is the ability for a wide variety of platforms, including aircraft, as well as various assets down below, to feed data about new threats into a larger electronic warfare ecosystem. Analysts and engineers can pick…

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Russian Intelligence Agencies Relying on ‘Bruce Force’ to Hack America

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Recently, the U.S. and British intelligence communities issued an advisory uncovering the “Brute Force” cyber techniques used by the Russian GRU intelligence agency against hundreds of Western government and private targets. These revelations come in the wake of months of successive cyberattacks against American and European targets, including the SolarWinds, which saw Russian and Chinese hackers gain access to U.S. government systems, and Colonial Pipeline, which interfered with the flow of fuel on America’s East Coast this past May.

According to the Intelligence Community, the GRU cyberattacks started from the middle of 2019 and are likely still ongoing, with the GRU’s 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS) unit 26165 identified as the main perpetrator behind the attacks. The goal of this cyber warfare campaign is to access protected and classified databases in order to purloin information, but also to pave the way for future breaches.  

The advisory is a joint product of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the FBI, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.’s signals intelligence agency. 

Related: America needs new covert options for Great Power Competition

KGB Reloaded: Russian Intelligence

The Russian intelligence apparatus is composed of four main agencies.

The SVR (Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii) is the external intelligence agency that focuses on foreign intelligence collection and is often compared to America’s CIA. While not entirely accurate, the comparison is somewhat apt.

The FSB (Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii) is the internal security and counterintelligence service that focuses on domestic intelligence, and is roughly the equivalent of America’s FBI.

The GRU (Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije) is the military foreign intelligence service that commands the Spetsnaz special operations units and a very rough equivalent of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).

Finally, the FSO (Federalnaya sluzhba okhrany) protects the Russian president but also…

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