Huge New Cyber Test Bed
Science 2.0 (Scientific Blogging renamed) reports that Northrup Grumman has opened a huge test facility for cyber-security in the UK.
The cyber range will be used for emulating large complex networks and for conducting cyber experiments and assessments of infrastructure survivability and assurance within a safe and controlled experimental environment to evaluate their resilience to cyber attacks. The UK cyber range has been designed to be federated with other cyber ranges anywhere in the world to create the capability for large-scale experiments to be carried out beyond the scope of a single facility.
I think that the international cyber threat is over-hyped. It’s not that I think it doesn’t exist, but I question the reported magnitude.
I suspect that many of the events reported as attacks are nothing more than random, as opposed to targeted, port scans. This article, though it is dated, explains them well. A scan is a scan is a scan and will go into thee logs just as surely as a targeted attack, and the logs cannot differentiate between the two.
Exercise good security practices and take the numbers with a grain of salt.
George Smith does a good job of following this stuff.