Computersight -

In 1983 the film “War Games” made Matthew Broderick an established star, and introduced computers, modems and the threat of hacking to everybody, through the magic of the big screen.

In that story, a teenager “accidentally” logs in to a US military network, and gains access to “Joshua” a super-computer that is playing “war games”, simulating different scenarios and strategy games, from tic-tac-toe and chess, to thermonuclear war.

The following years, more and more “incidents” would be reported, and more and more people would gain interest in hacking and computers. I know I did and every boy my age at school did too! “War Games” was indeed why I registered for my first computer class at school.

As time went by, hacking took many forms (and covers) and the internet, lead to an exponential increase of people who wanted to hack to other people’s computers. Initially the reason was the “fun of it”, the challenge, for the thrill. There was no real gain in most cases. Even people who hacked to the Pentagon or NASA faced encrypted information that was useless and incomprehensible most of the time.

During the last part of the cold war in the 80s and early 90s, there was an increase in the number of computer virus writers in the Eastern Block. It was very common for many virus to originate from Bulgaria, Russia and Czechoslovakia. The interesting thing about many of those viruses, was that there were pieces of very “clear evidence” as to who wrote them. As a result, American and British authorities, secret services and even software companies, got in touch with the writers, and managed to get many of them in the west. A smart move if you wanted to cross the Iron Curtain of the time.

It has been since the introduction of computer science in the mainstream universities, a policy of large corporations and government organisations, to recruit the best performing students, but also the “deviant ones”, the ones who had a problem working with others, the “lone wolves” who were usually of minimum social skills and extremely high IQ.

The competitive advantage of a student or a teenager hacker, over an educated professional, is that the first is thinking provocatively, out of the box, and does the unexpected. The latter is used to more formal and organised ways of thinking, and what he has in experience and technological knowledge, usually lacks in intuition and imagination.

But the times are changing. In the cold war, the enemy was known. The “Soviet threat” or the “threat from the East” as it was known, had a geographical position, had a name and a flag, and a given territory with borders and formal army. Back then, the government agencies were working undercover. Clandestine meetings and secret agents whose names were never revealed.

Today things are so different. The threat of terrorism is growing, and is getting new dimensions. You still have the suicide bombers and the assassinations; but now hijackers instead of diverting planes to friendly destinations requesting the release of their comrades, they throw them on the Pentagon and New York. Terrorists use the internet, the mobile networks and laptops to coordinate their efforts. Bombs are triggered by a mobile phone from thousands of miles away, and propaganda is siphoned through the web from ever changing web-hosts. Today the public wants the knowledge that their government is doing something. People have the need to see that something is being done, and so part of that marketing effort is what the US military has decided to do: a Computer Forensics competition, on counter cyber-terrorism scenarios. The teams join through official channels, register, and their work is published. Forget the man in black who will come to recruit you. It is all done online.

The US Department of Defence (Cyber Crime Centre) is organising for the fourth year in a row, a digital forensics competition, the “Cyber Challenge”, where forensic scientists from around the world can take part. Counter cyber terrorism organisations such as IMPACT are even becoming sponsors of the event. The winning team will get all expenses paid for the 2010 DoD Cyber Crime Conference.

But is this something new? Not really. China has already had successful competitions for hackers, who later on turned up attacking western targets both military and financial.

The US Department of Defence is trying to create a pool of really diverse people that will help the fight against cyber-crime and cyber-terrorism. Until now the contestants included military, academics and individuals.

The new Cyber Challenge includes new categories for high-school students and undergraduate college and university students. It is interesting to see some of the statistics of the latest entrants.

The contests will test skills applicable to both government and private industry: attacking and defending digital targets, stealing data, and tracing how others have stolen it.

The Air Force (USAF) is running its own competition called Cyber Patriot, that is has a “Red team” that tries to attack and steal data from the participants’ computers.

The recruiting and training of hackers, is of course controversial in itself. According to Forbes a parallel track of domestic cyber training raises the specter of U.S. government-trained hackers not only stealing data from foreign enemies–a diplomatically thorny prospect in itself–but also hacking other targets for fun or profit, and potentially becoming a rogue collection of skilled cybercriminals. “There probably could be a couple people we train that go to the dark side,” admits Jim Christy, director of the Department of Defense’s Cyber Crime Center. “But we’ll catch them and send a message. The good guys will outweigh the bad.”

The game of security is changing, and so are the methods and tools. In the future we shall see more attempts to recruit any kind of specialists, especially non-mainstream ones. Cyber crime and cyber terrorism require cyber-agents and cyber-agencies. It is a more silent, and less “explosive” war, but equally important and equally effective – for both sides.