NSA 'Red Team' of Crack Hackers Protects U.S. Secrets

In a world where the Chinese are apparently hacking everything in sight, spam is an everyday occurrence, and someone from Nigeria or Ghana always wants to give you money, it doesn’t come as any real surprise to learn that the Pentagon has an elite crack staff of hackers ensuring that at least the US national secrets are safe.

When Popular Mechanics writer Glenn Derene contacted the National Security Agency (NSA) in hopes of acquiring an interview with a member of the almost mythical elite “red team”, he was not really expecting to hear back, let alone get a “yes”. But, for whatever reason, he was granted an interview with someone who, on condition of anonymity, went by the name OWNSAVAOG (short for “An official within the National Security Agency’s Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group”).

Now it isn’t the world’s hardest job to identify just what it is OWNSAVAOG and red team do for a living. One quick Wikipedia search and you find that “red team” is a term in wargaming for “the opposing force in a simulated conflict.” Their primary job is to find the holes in a defense before the real enemy does, thus allowing time for a patch job.

This becomes especially difficult when you turn to the world of high level hackery and internet espionage. And that is where NSA’s red team steps in. They are some of the best hackers alive, and there is no second best for them. They live with a near 100% record, something that they “don’t keep statistics on,” but still acknowledge that they “do get in to most networks we target.”

Why? “Because every network has some residual vulnerability. It is up to us; given the time and the resources, to find the vulnerability that allows us to access it.”

According to OWNSAVAOG, the red team provide “adversarial network services to the rest of the DOD,” which in and of itself sounds awesome and terrifying in one breath. Their lives consist around breaking in to various DOD systems, without using any of the damaging attacks such as denial-of-service attacks, malicious Trojans or viruses.

The NSA red team is made up primarily of “…military personnel, civilian government employees and a small cadre of contractors,” said OWNSAVAOG. And while the former do the majority of the ops, the latter two provide the code and logistical support for their attacking brethren.

But while you have to be a rare breed to get in to the NSA red team – OWNSAVAOG described the qualities needed as “technical skills, an adversarial mind-set, perseverance and imagination” – it would appear that the IT department and admins therein at the Pentagon have the hardest tech jobs in the world. They are continually fending off real attacks, from the stay-at-home-in-their-mums-basement type, to the real international attacks, in addition to having to deal with, as PM’s described it, “a bunch of ace hackers with the same DOD stamp on their paychecks.”

Make sure you check out the full article via the link below, seriously fascinating stuff.

Posted by Josh Hill.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4270420.html