The United States Government Wants The Pentagon Hacked

The United States government is asking its citizens who are hackers, networks engineers or in any way related to the field of online security to evaluate the online stability of various open United States Defense Department websites, domains and online systems. This is the first and the only program where the Department of Defense has allowed ‘non-club members’ to become a part of this one of a kind program offered by the United States government.

Hack the Pentagon! – is patterned and similar to comparably competitive events labeled as – bug bounties. This program is being managed by a number of huge American corporations, and one such prominent corporation is the United Continental Holdings Inc., their reason to organize such an event is to uncover security holes inside their systems. Events like these would enable hackers, programmers and networking professionals to locate and uncover issues before malevolent attackers can take advantage of them which will allow the government to save huge amounts of money and time invested in repairing them – that is if such a damaging event were to take place.

Ash Carter, the Defense Secretary for the United States government, proudly stated that he is confident in bringing this program to the American citizens which will allow to strengthing of the online national security. During the press conference he assured the people watching and listening to him that the time has arrived for the Pentagon to open its doors to the brightest and the best professionals who can offer their services in the security industry and also because the engineers within the United States military were not doing a good job and weren’t getting the A+ results when the networking structure was being audited. To which he also added the fact that they are not able to keep up with the fast-growing challenges coming from the online security sector.

“We can’t just keep doing what we’re doing,” he stated while mentioning the pros and cons that the security industry will offer.

The White House’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Data Policy and Chief Data Scientist and also a former employee at LinkedIn and eBay DJ Patil mentioned the programs that have similarities like bug bounty or any type of a ‘hackathon’ shows the real face of an organization’s online security structure along with its vulnerabilities. And events like these also help them improve their networks and systems. He also mentioned that many other government departments are looking at this event, and if the results are astonishing then this will only be the start for a new kind of vulnerability testing – meaning helping the government.

For those of us who ponder over the words ‘Bug Bounty’ and think, ‘Ah they are just opening themselves up for an attack;’ are forgetting the fact that in today’s day and age everyone is alway under some kind of attack either from the corporations cloaking this breach of privacy and covering up by stating that they want to improve the marketing strategy or by the government for keeping an ‘eye out for national interests.’ With that said, security specialists who get selected will be working closely with their staff, then who knows some programmers or hackers may discover ways of improving the online security and making our online world safer and from the very own government, they are helping. Plus with the equipment present inside the Pentagon, you can only imagine what possibilities can come out.

However, the Department of Defense has long analyzed their networking systems making use of ‘their own employees’ or also referred to as the ‘Red Teams’. But this move to hire outsiders would likely unfold at least a few of their massive systems of networking grids to online obstacles coming from all over the security sector and the institutions working in the security industry. People who are willing to participate are required to be United States citizens and may have to show for several interviews for criminal history or anything similar before being accepted and start pen testing their systems. The office handling this also made it clear that the hackers would not be allowed to test classified networks and other secret artillery systems – at least, not until the hacker finds a way in.

The project is currently being held by the Pentagon’s Defense Digital Service; that was created in the November of 2015 to involve professionals from the technology industry to help the military service(s) for a brief period of time.

Source: BBC 

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