So who’s responsible for the transition from golf to football?
A suggestion by a bus driver with a push from Johnson’s mom, Tammie Edwards, sealed it.
“This is probably a unique story, but the main person who pushed me into playing football was my mom,” Johnson told GMFB. “My mom always taught me you wanna try things in life so you don’t look back and have regrets and for football, that was the case.”
There have been several hacks of Ukrainian organizations, but no reports yet of the sort of high-impact cyberattacks on transportation or electric infrastructure that some feared.
The possible explanations for this, analysts say, range from disorganization in Russian military planning to hardened Ukrainian defenses, to the fact that bombs and bullets take precedence over hacking in wartime.
The reason Russia has so far not flexed in cyberspace during the war may be unattainable — or require being inside the minds of Russian spy chiefs. But how US, European and Ukrainian officials perceive the situation shapes how they allocate resources to defend Ukrainian computer networks as the war continues.
“What we have seen to date from Russia’s state cyber actors appears to reflect the same challenges seen in their conventional forces,” said a US cyber defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. “It is likely that inadequate preparation and bad assumptions have resulted in a haphazard performance that underplays their known capabilities.”
Cyberattacks have played a supporting, not a central, role in the war and hacking incidents preceded and accompanied Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine:
• February 25: Ukrainian government officials accused hackers working for the Belarusian Ministry of Defense of trying to break into the private email accounts of Ukrainian military personnel.
• March 10: Unidentified hackers caused disruptions at Ukrainian internet service provider Triolan, which has customers in big Ukrainian cities. Triolan blamed “the enemy” (a reference to Russia) for the incident but did not provide evidence to support the allegation.
Gen. Paul Nakasone, the most senior military cyber official in the US government, offered a vague,…
WASHINGTON — Russia and China have each dedicated significantly more military cyber forces to conducting cyber effects than the United States, according to research by a London-based think tank.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Military Balance+ database, which evaluates global military trends, sought to provide a breakdown assessing the military cyber capabilities of these nations based mostly on active duty military forces with a responsibility for cyberspace operations (though some data was gathered on reservist units).
According to the report, 33% of Russia’s military cyber forces are focused on effects, compared to 18.2% of Chinese military forces and 2.8% of U.S. forces. This data was derived from the composition of principal cyber forces according to roles assigned to individual units.
Authors of the report clarified that “effects” generally refers to actions to deny, degrade, disrupt or destroy as well as those conducted by proxies in conjunction with a government actor. It can also include a range of other capabilities such as the ability to research vulnerabilities, write or use malware, and maintain command and control through exploits.
“Russia is a highly capable cyber power. Cyber capabilities are part of a broader framework of information operations, and strategic documents generally refer to cyber security under the rubric of ‘information security,’ ” the Military Balance report read.
In July 2021, Russia released an update to its National Security Strategy, devoting a section to information security and stressing the further development of military cyber forces and capabilities.
The IISS report noted that China has also shown significant improvements in its military cyber capabilities over the last decade, integrating offensive cyber operations into recent military exercises.
Russia also allots a significant amount of personnel to incident response, the report noted, with 80% of its forces dedicated to the mission. That is compared with 29% on the U.S. side and 9.1% on the Chinese side.
All three nations dedicated roughly the same proportion of forces to conducting cyber intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, hovering between…
States have long valued military parades. They allow countries to flaunt their most powerful tanks, aircraft, and missiles. However, what can a country do if it wants to showcase its considerable investments in offensive cyber capabilities? The typical “cyber weapon” entirely lacks the presence of a ballistic-missile launcher or impressively ranked armored vehicles. Even when a state might show off the more prominent footprint of their large-scale data centers, these lack obvious immediate offensive application — and you still can’t put a data center on parade. In addition, disclosing offensive cyber portfolios could allow adversaries to design defenses against them, or make it harder to carry out a cyber attack anonymously. This poses a dilemma for many states, China among them, that may wish to highlight their growing cyber arsenals — to signal readiness, relative advantage in correlation of forces, and commitment — without degrading the future effectiveness of these capabilities.
The Tianfu Cup competition in Chengdu increasingly appears to be the Chinese Communist Party’s way around this dilemma, a means of pursuing these objectives in a manner that has remained largely outside of strategic discourse in recent years. As a result, the remarkable display of capability in the event (which took place this month) deserves further scrutiny, as it conveys several key messages to an international audience. The Tianfu competition demonstrated the continued ability to hold key Western systems and networks at risk, highlighted the substantial depth of China’s offensive cyber inventories, and showed off a talent base of aggressive hackers undeterred by blowback from international exposure of its activities. Taken in total, this signaling also seems to suggest a trajectory towards a surprising future in which China’s offensive cyber power surpasses that of the West.
Reaching for the Cup
On the surface, the Tianfu Cup appears to be just another bug-bounty competition where hackers find new bugs in software code and submit them in return for cash awards. Vulnerability disclosure competitions like these arose in the mid-2000s as a means of disclosing device and…