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> Test reports we reviewed make it clear that simply having cybersecurity controls does not mean a system is secure. How the controls are implemented can signif

> Test reports we reviewed make it clear that simply having cybersecurity controls does not mean a system is secure. How the controls are implemented can significantly affect cybersecurity. For example, one test report we reviewed indicated that the system had implemented rolebased access control, but internal system communications were unencrypted. Because the system’s internal communications were unencrypted, a regular user could read an administrator’s username and password and use those credentials to gain greater access to the system and the ability to affect the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of the system. "Do you want to play a game?" This is some scary bad WarGames like security, password 'joshua' level. > Program offices were aware of some of the weapon system vulnerabilities that test teams exploited because they had been identified in previous cybersecurity assessments. For example, one test report indicated that only 1 of 20 cyber vulnerabilities identified in a previous assessment had been corrected. The test team exploited the same vulnerabilities to gain control of the system. When asked why vulnerabilities had not been addressed, program officials said they had identified a solution, but for some reason it had not been implemented. They attributed it to contractor error. Ah, the old blame the 'contractor error' and 'not invented here' syndrome. Looks like engineers aren't in the power structure to change these things, scary if the military is driven like an MBA only led business with no influence from engineering/security.

k_sh 8y ago
> scary if the military is driven like an MBA only led business with no influence from engineering/security Having known many people that worked in/around the military and defense industry, this seems like our reality.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  The modern DoD is based around the Asst Sec Defs and business processes put in place by Robert McNamara, who came from Ford. It's all stats and businees. Engineers and scientists are generally considered a sideshow, a workforce to quantitate.
  - drawkbox 8y ago
    A technology/security/defense product that the DoD is, should be more product focused rather than just metrics, metrics are important, but product, usability, security is more important. The wrong metrics can lead you astray[1]. The amount we pay for security, it is appalling some of the data in OP's report just to hit some arbitrary number over security and understanding of a defense product. > The modern DoD is based around the Asst Sec Defs and business processes put in place by Robert McNamara Robert McNamara, a Harvard Business School MBA, 'epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers' [1] [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514591/the-dictatorship-of-data/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514591/the-dictatorship-o...
  - davemp 8y ago
    This is, unfortunately, all too true. > “An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?’ The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term, mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the ﬁrst place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word, ‘programming.’ Iwanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying—I thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities" --Richard Bellman on the naming of dynamic programming [1] [1]: http://smo.sogang.ac.kr/doc/dy_birth.pdf http://smo.sogang.ac.kr/doc/dy_birth.pdf
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- abledon 8y ago
  What nations military isn’t driven by an MBA culture though? How is Russia’s And China’s in comparison ?
airstrike 8y ago
> an MBA only led business with no influence from engineering/security As an MBA holder and avid HN user, I take issue with that statement...
- dsr_ 8y ago
  You should note specific issues, rather than a general complaint.
  - hectormalot 8y ago
    I’ll bite. There was no indication in the article of anyone with an MBA in particular being responsible for these issues. The reasoning reads as: “lots of stuff is going wrong” ==> “must be because they have management with MBAs” Why try to make this link if it isn’t there? What if I replace MBAs with ‘foreigners’, ‘women’, ‘people who read HN’, etc? Why do we need this? Does blaming non-technical people for the failures of management make us feel better about ourselves?
    - michaelmrose 8y ago
      There is no reason to believe that foreigners or women contribute negatively. The thesis that parties who have negligible expertise in a given area given charge of people with substantial expertise in that area contribute minimal or negative value seems at least arguable. Maybe we as a society value the idea of teaching people to lead people irrespective of what those people actually do instead of elevating skilled individuals in that area because it allows us to reward all the rich peoples kids that aren't smart enough to do. This needn't mean you automatically are unintelligent or bad at what you do. You could personally be awesome and contribute greatly to the efforts you work with/lead.
  - ryandrake 8y ago
    When people blame things on MBAs here, they tend to not elaborate with specifics either. MBAs are used as straw man punching bags on HN. Anything that goes wrong with a company where there’s the perception that the “obvious technical solution” was ignored, is blamed on this nebulous cabal of MBAs, who are apparently hired in droves just to sabotage their employer. For some reason it’s totally ok to vaguely blame the business folks.
Jtsummers 8y ago
The problem isn't just MBAs. It's that scientific management has become central to the DoD's mode of functioning. Which is remarkably sad. The DoD in the WWII and post-WWII era actually developed a lot of good systems engineering practices and was largely successful on some massive projects. Since then, however, there has been the constant desire to deskill workers. That is, they want explicit operating/work instructions that mean even a trained monkey could do the job. This is useful for some things (got a broken down Jeep? Pull out the manual and even your Lt can fix it!), but for development, acquisitions, and sustainment this is actually a horrible idea. The infection of deskilling spread to the office. They've removed the office managers (among others) and left the work (critical, but time consuming and secondary to the mission) with the highly educated and trained staff. This diminishes their ability to focus on real work (see [0] from yesterday). From there, they continued to try to document precisely how engineering work is done. Believing that the process of the work is the same as the work. So if only my engineers knew how to properly fill out SF-1234 it wouldn't matter how educated they are, magically the work would be done. Of course, we all know this is bullshit. Knowledge work is called that for a reason. The capacity for work is based on the knowledge of the workers. You cannot deskill computer science or aerospace engineering. You can deskill aspects of it, or really the workflow, but not the science and engineering work itself. I can eliminate or largely reduce the need for a classical configuration manager by establishing a (automated) peer review and version control workflow. But the creative act producing content that enters the workflow will always require skilled, competent, knowledgeable engineers and scientists. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157885 EDIT: I will not change the above, but I will make a note. After re-reading the Wikipedia page on Scientific Management [1] I see that some people consider Lean and others to also be extensions of it. So read the above as describing Fordism and Taylorism, not scientific management in general. Any management largely based on, or influenced by, statistics, models, and experimentantion could be argued to be "scientific management", that doesn't mean it's bad. It's when it's taken to an extreme. Like, in Taylor's case, where workers are treated with contempt. The purpose of the management being to make them fully expendable. They had no unique knowledge or skills that could really contribute to the business beyond their physical presence and ability to follow directions. His goal was to disempower workers, whereas other examples (Lean particularly) work to empower workers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management
abledon 8y ago
Contractors and procurement also has to follow trade agreements and quotas . Probably way higher in priority than some engineers memo with indecipherable tech jargon about ‘security holes’

k_sh 8y ago

> scary if the military is driven like an MBA only led business with no influence from engineering/security Having known many people that worked in/around the military and defense industry, this seems like our reality.

killjoywashere 8y ago
The modern DoD is based around the Asst Sec Defs and business processes put in place by Robert McNamara, who came from Ford. It's all stats and businees. Engineers and scientists are generally considered a sideshow, a workforce to quantitate.
- drawkbox 8y ago
  A technology/security/defense product that the DoD is, should be more product focused rather than just metrics, metrics are important, but product, usability, security is more important. The wrong metrics can lead you astray[1]. The amount we pay for security, it is appalling some of the data in OP's report just to hit some arbitrary number over security and understanding of a defense product. > The modern DoD is based around the Asst Sec Defs and business processes put in place by Robert McNamara Robert McNamara, a Harvard Business School MBA, 'epitomizes the hyper-rational executive led astray by numbers' [1] [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514591/the-dictatorship-of-data/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/514591/the-dictatorship-o...
- davemp 8y ago
  This is, unfortunately, all too true. > “An interesting question is, ‘Where did the name, dynamic programming, come from?’ The 1950s were not good years for mathematical research. We had a very interesting gentleman in Washington named Wilson. He was Secretary of Defense, and he actually had a pathological fear and hatred of the word, research. I’m not using the term lightly; I’m using it precisely. His face would suffuse, he would turn red, and he would get violent if people used the term, research, in his presence. You can imagine how he felt, then, about the term, mathematical. The RAND Corporation was employed by the Air Force, and the Air Force had Wilson as its boss, essentially. Hence, I felt I had to do something to shield Wilson and the Air Force from the fact that I was really doing mathematics inside the RAND Corporation. What title, what name, could I choose? In the ﬁrst place I was interested in planning, in decision making, in thinking. But planning, is not a good word for various reasons. I decided therefore to use the word, ‘programming.’ Iwanted to get across the idea that this was dynamic, this was multistage, this was time-varying—I thought, let’s kill two birds with one stone. Let’s take a word that has an absolutely precise meaning, namely dynamic, in the classical physical sense. It also has a very interesting property as an adjective, and that is it’s impossible to use the word, dynamic, in a pejorative sense. Try thinking of some combination that will possibly give it a pejorative meaning. It’s impossible. Thus, I thought dynamic programming was a good name. It was something not even a Congressman could object to. So I used it as an umbrella for my activities" --Richard Bellman on the naming of dynamic programming [1] [1]: http://smo.sogang.ac.kr/doc/dy_birth.pdf http://smo.sogang.ac.kr/doc/dy_birth.pdf
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
abledon 8y ago
What nations military isn’t driven by an MBA culture though? How is Russia’s And China’s in comparison ?

airstrike 8y ago

> an MBA only led business with no influence from engineering/security As an MBA holder and avid HN user, I take issue with that statement...

dsr_ 8y ago
You should note specific issues, rather than a general complaint.
- hectormalot 8y ago
  I’ll bite. There was no indication in the article of anyone with an MBA in particular being responsible for these issues. The reasoning reads as: “lots of stuff is going wrong” ==> “must be because they have management with MBAs” Why try to make this link if it isn’t there? What if I replace MBAs with ‘foreigners’, ‘women’, ‘people who read HN’, etc? Why do we need this? Does blaming non-technical people for the failures of management make us feel better about ourselves?
  - michaelmrose 8y ago
    There is no reason to believe that foreigners or women contribute negatively. The thesis that parties who have negligible expertise in a given area given charge of people with substantial expertise in that area contribute minimal or negative value seems at least arguable. Maybe we as a society value the idea of teaching people to lead people irrespective of what those people actually do instead of elevating skilled individuals in that area because it allows us to reward all the rich peoples kids that aren't smart enough to do. This needn't mean you automatically are unintelligent or bad at what you do. You could personally be awesome and contribute greatly to the efforts you work with/lead.
- ryandrake 8y ago
  When people blame things on MBAs here, they tend to not elaborate with specifics either. MBAs are used as straw man punching bags on HN. Anything that goes wrong with a company where there’s the perception that the “obvious technical solution” was ignored, is blamed on this nebulous cabal of MBAs, who are apparently hired in droves just to sabotage their employer. For some reason it’s totally ok to vaguely blame the business folks.

Jtsummers 8y ago

The problem isn't just MBAs. It's that scientific management has become central to the DoD's mode of functioning. Which is remarkably sad. The DoD in the WWII and post-WWII era actually developed a lot of good systems engineering practices and was largely successful on some massive projects. Since then, however, there has been the constant desire to deskill workers. That is, they want explicit operating/work instructions that mean even a trained monkey could do the job. This is useful for some things (got a broken down Jeep? Pull out the manual and even your Lt can fix it!), but for development, acquisitions, and sustainment this is actually a horrible idea. The infection of deskilling spread to the office. They've removed the office managers (among others) and left the work (critical, but time consuming and secondary to the mission) with the highly educated and trained staff. This diminishes their ability to focus on real work (see [0] from yesterday). From there, they continued to try to document precisely how engineering work is done. Believing that the process of the work is the same as the work. So if only my engineers knew how to properly fill out SF-1234 it wouldn't matter how educated they are, magically the work would be done. Of course, we all know this is bullshit. Knowledge work is called that for a reason. The capacity for work is based on the knowledge of the workers. You cannot deskill computer science or aerospace engineering. You can deskill aspects of it, or really the workflow, but not the science and engineering work itself. I can eliminate or largely reduce the need for a classical configuration manager by establishing a (automated) peer review and version control workflow. But the creative act producing content that enters the workflow will always require skilled, competent, knowledgeable engineers and scientists. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157885 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18157885 EDIT: I will not change the above, but I will make a note. After re-reading the Wikipedia page on Scientific Management [1] I see that some people consider Lean and others to also be extensions of it. So read the above as describing Fordism and Taylorism, not scientific management in general. Any management largely based on, or influenced by, statistics, models, and experimentantion could be argued to be "scientific management", that doesn't mean it's bad. It's when it's taken to an extreme. Like, in Taylor's case, where workers are treated with contempt. The purpose of the management being to make them fully expendable. They had no unique knowledge or skills that could really contribute to the business beyond their physical presence and ability to follow directions. His goal was to disempower workers, whereas other examples (Lean particularly) work to empower workers. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management

abledon 8y ago

Contractors and procurement also has to follow trade agreements and quotas . Probably way higher in priority than some engineers memo with indecipherable tech jargon about ‘security holes’