Tag Archive for: force

A Force to reckon with : The Tribune India

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Manoj Joshi


Distinguished Fellow, Observer Research Foundation

There is considerable alarm in India’s strategic community as to whether the moves towards restructuring the armed forces to create theatre commands have been sufficiently thought through. A great deal of it arises from concerns that the man chosen to lead the task in 2017, Chief of Defence Staff Gen Bipin Rawat, has never really had the intellectual heft to handle it. He proved this spectacularly last week in declaring at a seminar that the Indian Air Force was merely ‘a supporting arm to the armed forces, just as artillery support or the engineer support the combatant arms in the Army.’

In one sentence, he negated the advances in warfighting that have taken place since World War II, and raised huge question marks about the intellectual underpinnings of the process he and his team are planning to put the Indian military through.

It doesn’t take a genius to know that the next conventional war will, in all likelihood, be initiated by cyber attacks, followed by air strikes on the land and sea. To be successful, the Army, Navy and the Air Force will have to use the Indian variants of the American AirLand and AirSea battle doctrines. There will be no room for single service ego trips here; ignore the compulsions of fighting on an integrated war plan, and you lose the war.

The purpose of creating a theatre command is the need for a structure that can fight an integrated battle. This is not about ordering a platoon on parade to make a right or a left turn. It is about taking a million-and-a-half-strong, somewhat archaic, war machine and putting it through new paces. The danger is that bits and pieces of that machine may fall off, be forgotten, or be incapable of meeting the new demands.

The IAF has categorically made it clear that it has very different views from those expressed by General Rawat. These were put forward at the same seminar by Air Chief Marshal RKS Bhadauria. In such circumstances, it would be foolhardy for the military to undertake the leaps being envisaged.

Decisions taken without careful study could unbalance…

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Space Force Looks to Boost Cyber Defenses of Satellites with Acquisition Reorganization

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The ongoing restructuring of Space Force acquisition authorities is designed in part to ensure proper cybersecurity testing and monitoring of new programs as they are developed and deployed, a senior Space Force procurement official said May 10.

The stand-up of Space Systems Command, and it’s absorption of the Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC), details of which were unveiled last month, was advertised as an effort to increase the speed and agility of Space Force acquisitions.

But in a lunchtime keynote at the CyberSatDigital event on May 10, Cardell DeLaPena, program executive officer for Space Production at SMC, stressed that it was also intended to improve the resilience of Space Force overhead architecture against new kinetic and cyber threats.

“The reason why we’ve stood up … a separate Space Systems Command for acquisition, and launch, and architecting is to make that shift from today’s peacetime architecture, … an architecture which was never envisioned to conduct offensive or defensive operations,” he said. In its place, Space Force plans a new architecture that could survive kinetic and cyberattacks by near-peer adversaries. “To make that pivot,” DeLaPena added, “We integrate all of those responses to those threats to our satellites into an integrated architecture, which will achieve space superiority.”

The new architecture, DeLaPena said, would rely on digital twinning technology, more properly called model-based systems engineering, in which a detailed virtual model of a satellite or other complex system is built so that it can be attacked and its cyber defenses tested.

DeLaPena said that cyber threats to U.S. satellite systems would be addressed in detail in a classified session later in the week, but outlined a series of “potential threats” in the cyber domain, which he said the newly reorganized acquisition elements in the Space Force would be “testing against” before turning new products over to operational commanders.

“The types of threats we are looking for [are] things like insertion of rogue components—that’s more on the supply side—malicious software, electronic warfare…

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A Ransomware Task Force Has Released Extensive Recommendations – Prepare Your Company Now! | Newmeyer Dillion

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In 2020, ransomware caused businesses an estimated $20 billion in losses worldwide. Those losses were a substantial increase from 2019 when ransomware caused $11.5 billion in business losses. Not only is the ransomware scourge growing, but cybercriminals are also increasingly attacking smaller and smaller companies, often because they have less security in place.

Last week, a multi-industry Ransomware Task Force issued a long anticipated, extensive report regarding how to deal with the ever-increasing threat that ransomware is posing to businesses, and in turn, the global economy. Due to the broad composition of the task force, the report recommends addressing ransomware holistically and from a number of different angles; below you will find several highlights from this report. All companies, regardless of size, are strongly encouraged to work with outside counsel and forensic consultants to prepare for the ransomware threat.

The Payment Problem

The biggest challenge with ransomware is that victims are making the problem worse. That is, the more payments that the criminals receive, the more resources they can afford to contribute to their operations. While the report does not recommend making ransom payments illegal, it recommends that they be discouraged, if possible. For example, it recommends requiring companies to assess all options before paying ransom and creating a fund to help those companies who choose not to pay. It also recommends that the payments be discouraged by enacting laws that impose stricter regulations on cryptocurrency.

In addition, it urges insurers who end up paying ransom to aggressively assert their subrogation rights and pursue the cybercriminals. One suggestion is for the insurance companies to collectively create a subrogation fund to evaluate and develop strategies to recoup their ransomware losses and to work with law enforcement. That could prove crucial as cybercriminals are increasingly attacking companies that they know have cyber insurance. Those efforts, as well as insurance companies more frequently requiring their insureds to stronger protections and protocols, should help curb the ransomware epidemic.

The Safe Havens

As ransomware has…

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Ransomware Targeted by New Justice Department Task Force

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WASHINGTON—The Justice Department has formed a task force to curtail the proliferation of ransomware cyberattacks, in a bid to make the popular extortion schemes less lucrative by targeting the entire digital ecosystem that supports them.

In an internal memorandum issued this week, Acting Deputy Attorney General

John Carlin

said ransomware poses not just an economic threat to businesses but “jeopardizes the safety and health of Americans.”

By identifying ransomware as a priority, the task force will increase training and dedicate more resources to the issue, seek to improve intelligence sharing across the department, and work to identify “links between criminal actors and nation-states,” according to the memorandum.

“By any measure, 2020 was the worst year ever when it comes to ransomware and related extortion events,” Mr. Carlin, who previously ran the Justice Department’s national-security division during the Obama administration, told The Wall Street Journal. “And if we don’t break the back of this cycle, a problem that’s already bad is going to get worse.”

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS

Have you ever been a victim of ransomware? Share your experience below.

Ransomware attacks, in which hackers cripple a software system until they receive a bounty, surged last year during the pandemic, along with financial demands, according to security experts and U.S. officials. The attacks have been around for decades but have flourished as society has become more dependent on technology.

Mr. Carlin said criminal hackers continue to demand ever greater sums of money from victims and reinvest those profits in cyber tools that enable more and better attacks.

The memo calls for developing a strategy that targets the entire criminal ecosystem around ransomware, including prosecutions, disruptions of ongoing attacks and curbs on services that support the…

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