G.O.O.D

Read the full story at: Popular Mechanics

What are red teams, you ask? They’re sort of like the special forces units of the security industry—highly skilled teams that clients pay to break into the clients’ own networks. These guys find the security flaws so they can be patched before someone with more nefarious plans sneaks in. The NSA has made plenty of news in the past few years for warrantless wiretapping and massive data-mining enterprises of questionable legality, but one of the agency’s primary functions is the protection of the military’s secure computer networks, and that’s where the red team comes in.

In exchange for the interview, I agreed not to publish my source’s name. When I asked what I should call him, the best option I was offered was: “An official within the National Security Agency’s Vulnerability Analysis and Operations Group.” So I’m just going to call him OWNSAVAOG for short. And I’ll try not to reveal any identifying details about the man whom I interviewed, except to say that his disciplined, military demeanor shares little in common with the popular conception of the flippant geek-for-hire familiar to all too many movie fans (Dr. McKittrick in WarGames) and code geeks (n00b script-kiddie h4×0r in leetspeak).

So what exactly does the NSA’s red team actually do? They provide “adversarial network services to the rest of the DOD,” says OWNSAVAOG. That means that “customers” from the many branches of the Pentagon invite OWNSAVAOG and his crew to act like our country’s shadowy enemies (from the living-in-his-mother’s-basement code tinkerer to a “well-funded hacker who has time and money to invest in the effort”), attempting to slip in unannounced and gain unauthorized access.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 10:28 am and is filed under Espionage, Police state. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.