Daily Archives: 10 April 2013

YGTBSM, Again

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Here’s this bit of news from Tech News Daily.

The Department of Defense (DoD) recently conducted an audit to evaluate how well the most powerful military force on Earth handled the security issues concerning personal mobile devices in conjunction with its professional duties.

The result: [failure]

DoD audited “use of iOS, Android, and Windows mobile devices among Army personnel and in Army facilities, where the devices joined on-site Wi-Fi networks.”  The audit found no requirement to:

  • secure storage for data on mobiles
  • insist on keeping devices free of malware
  • monitor mobiles while hooked up to computers or even
  • employ training or user agreements to keep military secrets under wraps
  • authorize personal mobile devices: almost 15,000 unauthorized devices in use (as a practical matter; the Army nominally requires prior authorization before use)

The audit also found these examples of failure:

  • a programmer failed to report a damaged iPhone, disposing of it on his own and replacing it out-of-pocket
  • mobile devices with no password protection
  • devices using outdated operating systems (leaving them open to exploits)
  • no protective software installed

If this is typical, our Army seems wholly unprepared for its role in a cyber strike.

The Mouse that Roared?

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With The People’s Republic of China confirming the northern Korea has been conducting live-fire drills near its border with the PRC, and with northern Korea having closed the Kaesong factory complex jointly run by northern Korea and the Republic of Korea—the last formal tie between nK and the RoK—a rude thought occurs to me.

Is Kim the Youngest smarter, more Machiavellian, than we give him credit for?

He has to know, after vacationingschooling in Switzerland as a younger youth just how badly off the northern Korean people are.  He might even consider them “his” people.  If he does, and if he’s of a mind to do anything about it, he also has to know that proposing reunification talks—a lá occupied Germany and the FRG—both is a death sentence for him and will blow up the government.  After all, the PRC has not fallen, and so it can still prop up a follow-on nK government, even if like the failed Soviet Union, it has no interest in bettering the lives of commoners.  The blowup, then, would have no effect vis-à-vis the outside world; although it would make things even worse internally, especially during the turmoil.

So, what’s a boy to do?  Start a fight he knows he can’t win, lose the fight, and get occupied.  If he burns a few (tens of thousands of) innocent bodies in the process, well, he is the product of three-plus generations of give-a-s*t about human life.

About all of his bluster and buildup: it might be of a piece with prior blusters, now getting out of control in the hands of a tyro.  But his actions sure are guaranteeing that the ones he’s going to attack are very well prepared for that attack.

The rat that roared?

Nah.  Probably not.