HackingTheUniverse

Some fast food restaurants use cash register keyboards with symbolic diagrams of different food products on them to make it easier to train new staff. The US military is also moving in that direction, trying to take a field that is complex and often accomplished at a highly intuitive level by self-trained individuals and move it into more automation and regimentation and make it much more teachable and controllable. In order to move from the old style “lone-wolf” hacker into a modern cyber-warrior team based concept, this is necessary. Teams of cyber-warriors will need excellent visualization tools for rapid sharing and assimilation of knowledge across the team. Command and control functions can be enhanced across the wide spectrum of technologies involved by integrating them into a common interface. Training can be standardized and greatly accelerated. Perhaps the most serious obstacle to this, certainly in a military environment, will be maintaining the high level of innovation that is needed to stay at the cutting edge of hacking techniques.

Network Attack Weapons Emerge – [aviationweek.com]

There are four broad objectives in designing the attack device: Capture expert knowledge but keep humans in the loop.

*Quantify results so that the operator can put a number against a choice.

*Enhance execution by creating a tool for the nonexpert that puts material together and keeps track of it.

*Create great visuals so missions can be executed more intuitively.

This particular network attack prototype has a display at the operator’s position that shows a schematic of the network of interest and identifies its nodes.

“You could be talking about thousands and thousands of nodes being involved in a single mission,” says a second network attack researcher. “Being able to visualize that without a tool is practically impossible.”

A touch-screen dashboard beneath the network schematic display looks like the sound mixing console at a recording studio. The left side lists cyberattack mission attributes such as speed, covertness, attribution and collateral damage. Next to each attribute is the image of a sliding lever on a long scale. These can be moved, for example, to increase the speed of attack or decrease collateral damage.

Each change to the scales produces a different list of software algorithm tools that the operator needs. “Right now, all that information is in the head of a few guys that do computer network operations and there is no training system,” says the first specialist.