There have been 17,000 scans of the Air Force network this year. Of those, 132 were suspicious events, including 10 new malware signatures, Lt. Gen. Bill Lord, USAF’s chief of warfighting integration, said last week in his address at AFA’s inaugural CyberFutures Conference in National Harbor, Md. “They are after our intellectual property, defense, financial, intelligence information and more,” he said. He added, “Most importantly, though, they are accessing our networks for later exploitation.” Protecting the network, however, isn’t the only solution. Those attacking and hacking into the Defense Department’s network are becoming more and more sophisticated. If they can’t successfully penetrate the network, they will simply move on to the 19,000 applications on the USAF network—each of which has a varying degree of security. To combat the problem, the Air Force is rethinking the way it trains and certifies those who operate on and run the networks. It’s also going through “rigorous testing to fix these holes” in its applications, said Lord. “You can’t just tear off the shrink wrap and click, click, click until you realize it doesn’t work,” he said.
The Air Force and Boeing agreed to a nearly $2.4 billion contract for a new lot of KC-46 aerial tankers on Nov. 21. The deal, announced by the Pentagon, is for 15 new aircraft in Lot 11 at a cost of $2.389 billion—some $159 million per tail.