The Friday Brief

Last Updated on Friday, 23 October 2009 01:36 Written by Jeffreycarr Friday, 23 October 2009 01:36

A few items of note for the end of the week:

• In the 8 years that the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission has been reporting on the state of the Chinese military, this is by far the best report that it has ever issued in the area of Information Warfare (aka Cyber Warfare). Kudos to Northrup Grumman who won the contract to write this special report, and to Steve DeWeese (Project Manager), Bryan Krekel (principal author), George Bakos and Christopher Barnett (Subject Matter Experts). My only objection is that the team didn’t pursue the relationship between the PRC and the Chinese hacker community far enough. Other than that, this is really outstanding work. It will certainly be required reading for our upcoming Cyber Threat Analysis online graduate course at Mercyhurst College Institute of Intelligence Studies.
• McAfee’s Focus 09 conference featured a few exceptionally well-detailed and charted explorations into Russian Organized Crime’s involvement in cyber crime. Great work by Dmitri Alperovitch and Dirk Kolberg.
• This news from Symantec is a bit dated, but it underscores my prediction about Africa as a major emerging threat for 2010 due to the arrival of broadband next year.

Finally, I’m pleased to welcome the Finnish Air Force as new IntelFusion FLASH Traffic subscribers. I’m pleasantly surprised that subscriptions for U.S. and Foreign government agencies and organizations to our cyber intelligence weekly brief are running about 50:50. In a way, that ratio symbolizes the key to success in both defensive and offensive Computer Network Operations, too; i.e., building international partnerships in law enforcement and intelligence through collaboration for mutual benefit.