CDX at West Point
-
- April
- 22
I spent a few hours at West Point academy today, watching the seventh annual Cyber Defense Exercise in action.
A team of roughly 30 cadets, led by senior Adrian Tilston, tried to defend a computer network against professional NSA hackers. I was pretty impressed.
The thing was that they were working in such a jargon-filled, complicated world of hacking and counterhacking that I really could barely scratch the surface of what exactly was going on.
These cadets were roaming through random computer folders, looking for malicious files, and NSA operatives managed to sneak into the system using a dormant program that only pops up every few hours on a computer.
The thing that really cooked my noodle was that the cadets were running the entire exercise on “virtual computers”—or computers run on computers—so all the viruses and hacks won’t mess up the expensive hardware.
Cadet Andy Wolfe told me using a virtual computer is kind of like when you copy a Microsoft Word document—you can do whatever you want with the copy and the original file remains the same. I still don’t really get it.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 at 6:33 pm by Ben Rubin.
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