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  July 13, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security

  Making DoD Security Operations Centers More Effective: Security Automation

  Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) software frees DoD analysts to apply cognitive skills to actually fixing problems. By SPLUNKon July 10, 2020 at 6:39 PM The Defense Department's most recent National Defense Strategy (NDS) describes a complex military environment characterized by increased global disorder, a decline in the long-standing rules-based international order, myriad threats from rogue states like Iran and North Korea, great power peers like China and Russia, malicious hackers, and terrorists in places like Yemen. One of the military domains where this dynamic is most evident is cyberspace, where bad actors arguably have comparable or better cyber capabilities than us. “This increasingly complex security environment is defined by rapid technological change, challenges from adversaries in every operating domain, and the impact on current readiness from the longest continuous stretch of armed conflict in our nation's history,” the NDS states. “In this environment, there can be no complacency—we must make difficult choices and prioritize what is most important...” More cybersecurity threats mean more cyberattacks on DoD networks. Essye Miller, former principal deputy for the DoD CIO, said recently that attacks on department networks are surging and that the attack surface is expanding as adversaries target DoD employees working from home during the coronavirus pandemic. This surge in cyberattacks means that analysts working in DoD information security operations centers (SOCs) are being bombarded with security alerts. With so many events, it's hard for them to differentiate true alerts from false ones, and to determine which events are priorities to address immediately. Through no fault of their own, they end up chasing their tail when their time could be better spent on mission-critical activities that directly support warfighters. The solution for this domain is automation. While popular in commercial software segments for years—including SalesForce automation, marketing automation, human resources automation, and IT automation—DoD security teams are just beginning to realize the benefits of what's known as security orchestration, automation, and response. The Value of Security Automation “Automation is nothing new to the military. The Defense Department is making great inroads into DevSecOps, for example,” explained Drew Church, senior security advisor at Splunk, referring to an agile software development process where software is quickly developed, tested, and improved over weeks and months rather than years. “A key, fundamental concept of DevSecOps is automation. The point of automation in DevSecOps is to bring together different technologies, tools, people, and processes to develop code and get it out to the war fighter more rapidly. “Automation provides that same capability inside IT operations procedures, security operations procedures, and other business processes,” said church. “It does this in a reliable and repeatable fashion every time, and at speed and scale.” Splunk's SOAR solution is called Phantom. It helps security teams work to identify, analyze, and mitigate threats facing their organizations. It can be used to improve efficiency, shorten incident response times and reduce the growing backlog of security incidents, even when there's a shortfall of DoD security personnel to analyze the volume of daily security alerts. Phantom does so by integrating teams, processes, and tools, and by automating tasks, orchestrating workflows, and supporting a range of SOC functions to include event and case management, collaboration, and reporting. In essence, it frees SOC analysts of the usual Tier I-type activities of gathering data from the security information and event management (SIEM) platform, prioritizing these alerts, performing triage to determine if an alert is real or a false alarm, configuring and managing security monitoring tools, and generating trouble tickets. Instead, Splunk Phantom lets them spend more time on the value-added work of Tier II SOC analysts. This includes actually investigating the trouble tickets, responding to incidents, and leveraging threat intelligence to better understand the threat and be proactive rather than reactive. “Focusing on the bureaucracy of security rather than the actual doing of security limits the effectiveness of security analysts,” said Church. “Better to free them of the tasks that can be easily automated like reviewing IP addresses, domain names, and URLs so that they can be force multipliers in conducting the thoughtful work needed to protect DoD networks. “That automation is done for them in Phantom. It let's analysts focus on investigating and taking remediation or mitigation steps as appropriate. Where humans excel is in actually thinking through a problem. Copying and pasting from websites, emails, and reports is not the most effective use of a highly paid, resource-limited talent pool.” Integration With Existing SOC Tools SOC analysts make their decisions by gathering information. They sometimes review classified military intelligence, but usually they look at a lot of open-source information and data from commercial off-the-shelf products from myriad providers of cybersecurity threat intelligence products. Some of the common ones that are relevant to the Defense Department include: McAfee's ePolicy Orchestrator, which the DoD refers to as Host Based Security Systems (HBSS); and Tenable's Security Center, which is known inside the DoD as Assured Compliance Assessment Solution (ACAS). Splunk Phantom has more than 300 out-of-the-box integrations with products like HBSS and ACAS. “Being integrated with each of those products permits the analyst to get the information they need without having to go to another browser window, or another tab, or a different computer,” said Church. “Phantom automatically brings all that data to the analyst. That takes somebody who spends most of their time copying information from page A into system B and lets them make more rapid and accurate determinations about the threat.” Through the use of APIs (application programming interface), that same integration is also found with government off-the-shelf (GOTs) solutions that haven't before been integrated with Splunk Phantom because there was never a request to do so. The same goes for a custom app created by a DevSecOps shop like the Air Force's Kessel Run project in Boston, for example. Automating these vital but drudgerous processes also pays dividends during both staffing shortfalls and times of surge, and brings consistency to SOC activities. Military service members are constantly rotating and changing duty stations; senior leadership turns over regularly. Contractors have to be relied upon to provide continuity from tour to tour. That means that SOC processes that were well oiled on a Monday may no longer be operating smoothly on Friday because of a change of command. Or maybe there is a compelling event that grabs everyone's attention. Or possibly there are legal or policy requirements that need to be addressed, and though they don't add mission value they still must be completed. Automation by Splunk Phantom smooths out the bumps associated with those all-to-common scenarios by keeping the flow of vital data moving to where it can be acted upon best. “The computer's running the marathon for you so that you are free to sprint and swarm on the problems that need the most resources at any particular time,” said Church. The Takeaway For security analysts, incident handlers/responders, IT operations managers, security operations managers, and forward-leaning business process experts, Splunk Phantom is all about removing barriers so people can get back to accomplishing the mission, maximizing productivity of skilled personnel and organizations. “For anybody that has a business process, a mission process, an IT operations process, or a security process and wants to free those skilled workers to get back to what you brought them onboard to do, we can help you with that,” said Church. “We do that through orchestration, we do that through automation. We bring in collaboration, and we're able to do that at scale because of the value that a company like Splunk brings to the table. By being able to have a rich ecosystem of partners and support across the board, we're able to do that even with differences from organization to organization.” Splunk Phantom addresses technology-based processes, and orchestrates and automates those processes to get people back to doing what they do best. https://breakingdefense.com/2020/07/making-dod-security-operations-centers-more-effective-security-automation/

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  February 10, 2024 | International, Land

  Canadian ‘Maple Hawk’ tour: Red Arrows to celebrate RCAF centennial - Skies Mag

  Officially known as the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, the Red Arrows have scheduled performances at four Canadian air shows starting in August.

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  March 9, 2020 | International, Aerospace

  U.S. Air Force Plots Fleet Insertion Path For ‘Loyal Wingman’

  The format of the U.S. Air Force's “fireside chat” series is well-understood. A technology pioneer such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson or Mark Cuban appears onstage at an Air Force-affiliated event, counsels an audience of pilots and airmen about innovation and, not least, tries not to offend anyone. Elon Musk arrived at the Air Warfare Symposium on Feb. 28 with a different plan. The founder of SpaceX and Tesla, who seems to delight in publicly tweaking established competitors in the space market such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, sat on the Air Force Association's (AFA) stage and declared that the fighter aircraft—for decades the heart of the Air Force's tactical combat capability—is already irrelevant. “The fighter-jet era has passed,” Musk said, provoking audible gasps and murmurs in an audience peppered with officers clad in flight suits. Lt. Gen. John Thompson, Musk's interviewer, quickly changed the subject. Hours later, Musk clarified in a tweeted reply to Aviation Week that he meant the fighter aircraft remains relevant, just not the pilot onboard. “The competitor [to a manned fighter] should be a drone fighter plane that is remote-controlled by a human, but with its maneuvers augmented by autonomy,” Musk writes. Musk's comments on airpower should be taken with a grain of salt. Although his companies have sought to disrupt the space, automotive and mining industries, Musk has no track record in the aircraft sector. One of his symposium hosts, David Deptula, a retired lieutenant general who is now dean of the AFA's Mitchell Institute, also pointed out in a rapidly published rebuttal in Forbes that Musk's predictions about autonomy are often wrong, even when it concerns the self-driving capabilities of Tesla cars. But Musk's remarks only differed with those of senior Air Force officials at the same event in the details of timing and scope. For over a year, Will Roper, assistant secretary of the Air Force for acquisition, technology and logistics, has championed a vision of future airpower populated by numerous, small batches of autonomous aircraft augmenting manned fighters with specialized capabilities. For the first time, Gen. James Holmes, head of Air Combat Command (ACC), offered a path to introducing such aircraft into the fleet around 2025-27. In the near term, the Air Force is focused on replacing aging F-15C/Ds with a mix of Boeing F-15EXs and Lockheed Martin F-35As. The Air Force decided to add the F-15EX to its inventory last year even as the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) began experimenting with a new class of low-cost aircraft with an “attritable” value. The first such experimental aircraft, the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie, in March 2019 completed the first of four flights made to date. Next year, the Air Force plans to fly the XQ-58A or a similar aircraft with an artificial intelligence “brain,” which allows the so-called Skyborg aircraft to learn maneuvers as it flies. Such capabilities are not far from Musk's vision of future air combat, but they are too immature to replace a fleet of F-15Cs on the verge of being grounded; hence, the decision to buy the F-15EX instead. The next opportunity to introduce a new kind of aircraft comes in about 5-8 years, Holmes says. That timing dovetails, perhaps intentionally, with the schedule for maturing aircraft such as the XQ-58A and Skyborg. The Air Force will need to replace hundreds of F-16 Block 25s and Block 30s, which entered production in the mid-1980s. “There's an opportunity there if we want to cut in something new, a low-cost attritable, loyal wingman and the different things that we're looking at and experimenting with,” Holmes says. In late February, Holmes and Roper met to discuss the meaning of a “fighter aircraft” in the future with the Next-Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program in the backdrop. The program office for NGAD began operations in October, with a focus on inventing a new production process capable of affordably producing small batches of advanced aircraft every 3-5 years. But Air Force officials are still grappling with the definition of basic requirements such as range and payload, as operations in the vast Pacific Ocean dominate the calculations. “The equation and the kind of math that we use for a fighter still works pretty well in the European environment—the range and payload and distance,” Holmes says. “It's not as effective a solution in the Pacific, because of the great distances. So as you look at NGAD and you look at the following programs, I wouldn't expect it to produce things that necessarily look like a traditional fighter.” The exhibit hall at the Air Warfare Symposium offered some clues. Besides the usual displays and posters of F-35s and F-15s, some new concepts appeared. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI) showed a concept design called “Defender,” an apparent variant of the Predator C Avenger, armed with air-to-air missiles and infrared search-and-track sensors. The Defender would protect an “outside force” of enablers, such as tankers and surveillance aircraft, from aerial attack while an inside force of stealth bombers and fighters engaged targets downrange, a GA-ASI spokesman says. Kratos, meanwhile, continues working on the XQ-58. The AFRL initially funded five test flights, but despite a crash landing on the third flight, all test objectives were met after the third test, says Steve Fendley, president of Kratos' Unmanned Systems Division. The AFRL now is accelerating the “missionization” of the XQ-58, Fendley says, adding payloads and potentially weapons. The first payload integration will be demonstrated in April, when the XQ-58 serves as a communication conduit between the F-35 and the F-22. Meanwhile, Kratos has started production, with 12 XQ-58s scheduled off the assembly line by the first quarter of 2021. The fleet will be assigned to multiple demonstration programs, funded by several agencies, Fendley says. The XQ-58's performance helps define the new class of aircraft, called “loyal wingman” in the U.S. and “remote carriers” in Europe. A critical feature shared by the XQ-58 and similar aircraft such as the Boeing Airpower Teaming System (ATS) is range. Both are capable of flying 3,000 nm unrefueled, almost three times the range of the F-35. Unlike the ATS, the XQ-58 does not need a runway to land, and instead deploys a parachute. Both aircraft seem unrecognizable from the typical next-generation fighter favored by ACC, but the command is changing its approach, Holmes says. “In the past at Air Combat Command, we would have built something that we call a fighter road map . . . to figure out what our fighter force will look like for the next 30 years,” Holmes said. “What I would rather build is a capabilities road map that shows how we're going to accomplish the missions for the Air Force that we traditionally had done with fighters.” At the same time, Holmes' counterparts in the Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC) are also changing their approach to fighter acquisition. Last October, the AFMC established the Advanced Aircraft Program Executive Office, which is tasked with reinventing the acquisition process for the next class of fighters. A modern fighter is typically developed over a decade and then sustained for several more. For the next generation, the Air Force now prefers to produce multiple aircraft in small batches, in development cycles lasting only five years. The sustainment phase would be minimal, as the aircraft would be phased out after a brief operational career. The approach requires that the Air Force make the design phase profitable for contractors, which now lose money in design and earn profits during the sustainment phase. The approach means paying higher prices up front for the design, but theoretically less overall during the shorter lifespan of the aircraft. The Air Force is still trying to craft the contractual mechanism for such an acquisition approach, says Gen. Arnold Bunch, the head of AFMC. “Industry is going to have to rethink how they want to go do this. They're gonna have to talk to their boards in a different way,” Bunch says. “[Something] we also have to factor into that is: How do I do my cost estimates? How do I do my financial planning? How do I interact with Congress?” https://aviationweek.com/defense-space/aircraft-propulsion/us-air-force-plots-fleet-insertion-path-loyal-wingman