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[ISN] Darpa Taking Fire for Its Cyberwar Range

From: InfoSec News (alertsinfosecnews.org)
Date: Tue Jun 22 2010 - 00:25:44 CDT

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/06/darpa-taking-fire-for-its-cyberwar-range/

By Noah Shachtman
Danger Room
Wired.com
June 21, 2010

Two years ago, the White House and the Pentagon launched a massive,
secretive $17 billion effort to shore up the nation's defenses, and
assigned Darpa a crucial role: build a replica Internet - a "National
Cyber Range" - that could not only be used to test out information
attacks, but could "emulate human behavior on all nodes," as well.

The project, personally guided by then-director Tony Tether, was
supposed to be one of the most important in Darpa's history, on par with
the agency's missions at the dawn of the space race. "Congress has given
Darpa a direct order; that's only happened once before - with the
Sputnik program in the '50s," one defense official told Danger Room. The
New York Times went even further, breathlessly proclaiming that "the
Cyber Range is to the digital age what the Bikini Atoll - the islands
the Army vaporized in the 1950s to measure the power of the hydrogen
bomb - was to the nuclear age."

But now, some in the armed services are grumbling that Darpa isn't
working quickly enough on this all-important, $130 million mission. A
few agencies are even looking to build their own ranges, Aviation Week
reports.

"The services didn't want to wait around for Darpa," a senior official
tells the magazine. "Everybody wanted a range, but Darpa's program was a
6-to-7-year effort to put a national cyber range in place. That's why
support eroded. Everybody wanted it quicker." The Navy, the National
Security Agency, and the Air Force are all pursuing ersatz Internet
programs, according to AvWeek.

[...]

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