Defence
Industry Fears Massive Losses Through Espionage
US
Military Also Boosting Cyber Workforce
Dec.
8, 2014 - 03:45AM |
By
AARON MEHTA
Analysts
have said the design of the Chinese J-31 stealth fighter, here performing at
the Airshow China 2014 in Zhuhai on Nov. 11, resembles the Lockheed Martin
F-35. (Johannes Eisele /
Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — To see the
impact of cyber attacks on US industry and its Pentagon customers, one need
look no further than last month’s Zhuhai Airshow, where China’s military showed
off its J-31 stealth fighter and JY-26 “Skywatch-U” 3-D long-range air
surveillance radar.
Analysts have pointed out that the two
designs hew very closely to two Lockheed Martin products — the F-35 joint strike fighter and the company’s radar offering for the Air Force’s
Three Dimensional Expeditionary Long-Range Radar (3DELRR) competition,
respectively. Reports of a major cyber breach of Lockheed’s programs by Chinese
hackers have been around since April 2009, and a general consensus has emerged
across industry that China’s military has benefited from that information.
That kind of infiltration is costing US
industries billions of dollars, warned Brett Lambert, former deputy assistant
secretary of defense for manufacturing and industrial base policy, during
November’s NATO Industry Forum in Split, Croatia.
“No one has been hit harder on a seismic
scale than US industry,” he said, citing estimates that the US has lost $300
billion in intellectual property, with much of it coming from the defense
industry.
“We need to protect the intellectual
property of not just our companies, but the intellectual capital of our defense
industries, and frankly, industry is ahead of this game more than governments.”
Speaking on the same panel, Domingo
Ureña Raso, Airbus Defence and Space’s executive vice president for military
aircraft, agreed industry is ahead of government on these issues. He also said
companies are starting to come together to work on cyber challenges because of
the shared risk.
“It’s a common enemy today when you talk
about the cyber attacks; none of those companies are willing not to cooperate
to avoid these kind of things, because they attack to the pillars, to the
basements of those companies,” he said.
Raso argued that further cooperation
among industry and government on cybersecurity will benefit both sides.
“In the last years cybersecurity has
been drastically improved thanks to this cooperation,” he said. “Industry in
many cases will continue to evolve this technology because we need, and the
market is requesting, this kind of capability. … We can do together, or we can
do separately, but we are going to do anyhow because we need business and to
export this knowledge because for us that is a market.”
Can government catch up? The US Air
Force, for one, is trying. In recent long-term strategy plans, the service has
emphasized cyber capabilities and the need to grow the cyber workforce.
That includes creating what Air Force
Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh has termed “cyber pilgrims,” individuals
embedded across the service with cyber expertise, rather than being grouped
under the banner of the 24th Air Force or a cyber command.
To drive that, the chief asked
researchers at Air University to draft a strategy for cyber force development.
That strategy will be briefed to the chief and others in January, said retired
Lt. Gen. Allen Peck, who leads the Air Force Research Institute.
“The chief is concerned [about] the
demand signal for cyber warriors — how much will this cost, what’s the best and
most efficient way to do this,” Peck said .
While plans for increasing the number of
cyber warriors in the service are underway, Air University is also helping
educate top leadership on cyber issues.
In November, a handful of top military
officials attended a weeklong cyber course at Maxwell Air Force Base in
Montgomery, Alabama, that featured speakers from industry and academia. Among
attendees, Peck said, were Gen. Darren McDew of Air Mobility Command, Gen. John
Hyten of Air Force Space Command and top generals from the Navy, Army and
Marine Corps.
At a lower level, Peck’s team is looking
into starting a cyber center that would be a focus of research and an
educational tool for officers who come through Air University at various points
in their careers.
“We do not currently have a place I can
take you and say, ‘this is our cyber center,’ but I can see that happening,” he
said. “When we get some fidelity on what the numbers will be, we may move in
that direction.
“We have a cyber chair at the War
College and we have cyber smart people around, so we have resources to
leverage. But if we were going to have a center for cyber studies, we’d need a
little bit more support,” Peck added. “None of [this is] outlandishly
expensive. If you slipped a spacecraft a week in production, you could pay for
the whole thing.”
Like Raso, Peck believes industry is
ahead of the service.
“We cannot do this by ourselves,” he
said. “We have to leverage what industry, what business and universities are
doing, because in many ways they are on the leading edge of technology and
thought on these things. So I think it’s more important that we have
collaborative relationships.”
Lambert, however, remains pessimistic
industry and government can come together in time.
“I fear that by the time everyone comes
to an agreement on what needs to be protected it will already be gone,” he
said.
No comments:
Post a Comment