WEST POINT, N.Y. — The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken.
Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”
These are the war games at West Point, at least last month, when a team of cadets spent four days struggling around the clock to establish a computer network and keep it operating while hackers from the National Security Agency in Maryland tried to infiltrate it with methods that an enemy might use. The N.S.A. made the cadets’ task more difficult by planting viruses on some of the equipment, just as real-world hackers have done on millions of computers around the world.
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For old-fashioned detectives, the problem was always acquiring information. For the cybersleuth, hunting evidence in the data tangle of the Internet, the problem is different. “The holy grail is how can you distinguish between information which is garbage and information which is valuable?” said Rafal Rohozinski, aUniversity of Cambridge-trained social scientist involved in computer security issues. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/12/science/12cyber.html?ref=science
