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September 25, 2024 | International, C4ISR, Security

Cybersecurity Researchers Warn of New Rust-Based Splinter Post-Exploitation Tool

Unit 42 reveals the discovery of Splinter, a new Rust-based post-exploitation tool posing cybersecurity risks.

https://thehackernews.com/2024/09/cybersecurity-researchers-warn-of-new.html

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  • Textron is no longer working with the Air Force on an airworthiness assessment for the Scorpion jet. But these two companies are.

    July 26, 2018 | International, Aerospace

    Textron is no longer working with the Air Force on an airworthiness assessment for the Scorpion jet. But these two companies are.

    By: Valerie Insinna LONDON — In 2016, the Air Force opened a new office to evaluate the airworthiness of military aircraft it didn't plan to buy, thus making it easier for those U.S. companies to sell internationally. Now its flagship effort with Textron's Scorpion jet has been suspended. After moving through the first phase of the airworthiness assessment, Textron decided to step away from the process, Bill Harris, Textron's vice president for Scorpion sales, confirmed in a July 14 interview. The reason, he said, is that the company opted to pool its financial resources in support of its AT-6 Wolverine turboprop that the Air Force is evaluating as part of the light attack experiment. If turned into a program of record, that opportunity could be worth several hundred planes. “AT-6 is a very important program,” Harris told Defense News at the Royal International Air Tattoo. “Any smart company moves their resources where they need to go, and all of our efforts with the Scorpion are privately funded.” The Air Force announced in July 2016 that it had signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement, or CRADA, with Textron. The agreement was the first of its kind, aimed at allowing the Air Force to gain insight into technologies they aren't purchasing and to clear away some of the evaluations that must be done before a sale to a foreign nation. That agreement — along with the opening of a new Non-DoD Military Aircraft Office (NDMAO)— garnered much media attention in the months following. In an August 2016 interview, the head of the NDMA office said that a CRADA to assess the Lockheed Martin-Korean Aerospace Industries F/A-50 was soon to be signed, and that another agreement for a different aircraft could be on its heels. However, no such agreement on the F/A-50 or any other aircraft ever surfaced, and the work of the NDMAO faded into obscurity. Textron may have suspended its efforts to assess the Scorpion jet, but the NDMAO is working on two active projects, said Robert FitzHarris, the deputy director of the service's airworthiness office, in a statement. One involves the an agreement between the Air Force and General Atomics to conduct an airworthiness assessment of the MQ-9B SkyGuardian drone and the SeaGuardian, its maritime variant, he said. The CRADA is the first between the office an a maker of unmanned aircraft. In essence, SkyGuardian is a version of the MQ-9 Reaper that will be certified to fly in any airspace safely. The drone has already found its first customer: the United Kingdom, which could buy anywhere from 21 to 26 copies. Beyond that, the airworthiness assessment could raise the confidence levels of other countries interested in buying SkyGuardian. And, importantly, it gives the U.S. Air Force a window into the MQ-9B's capabilities — which could help SkyGuardian break into the U.S. market. IOMAX is also engaged in a CRADA with the Air Force for an assessment of its Archangel turboprop aircraft, FitzHarris said. Like General Atomics, IOMAX has sold the Archangel internationally, but the addition of an airworthiness assessment from the Air Force may help attract new customers or pave the way for speedier sales. Both the General Atomics and Iomax efforts are still in Phase 1, where the Air Force and company lay out an “airworthiness assessment basis” that establishes a common understanding of how the airworthiness of a given aircraft would have been evaluated and graded. Phase 2 revolves around submitting test reports, risk assessments and engineering data to the Air Force, who then conducts a technical assessment based on that data. “We don't do flight testing. We simply rely upon the data provided by the collaborator," FitzHarris told Defense News in 2016, when he was leading the NDMA office. "There's testing, analysis, all of these things that typically feed into an assessment,” he said. “We have the technical expertise to take that [...] and give an assessment of compliance. Where there is compliance lacking or data lacking, we're going to assess risk and then we provide that information in an assessment package back to the collaborator." Textron is open to restarting the airworthiness assessment effort for Scorpion in the future, provided it's able to nail down a first customer to help offset the expense of doing the evaluations, Harris said. "[Once] we that launch customer, then we'll re-initiate that program,” he said. “Until we get that, being privately funded and not a program of record with the air force, that continues to be all on our nickel.” https://www.defensenews.com/digital-show-dailies/riat/2018/07/25/textron-is-no-longer-working-with-the-air-force-on-an-airworthiness-assessment-for-the-scorpion-jet-but-these-two-companies-are/

  • Elbit Systems Awarded Approximately $270 Million Contract to Supply Rocket Artillery for an International Customer

    August 6, 2024 | International, Aerospace

    Elbit Systems Awarded Approximately $270 Million Contract to Supply Rocket Artillery for an International Customer

    Driven by its agile, collaborative culture, and leveraging Israel’s technology ecosystem, Elbit Systems enables customers to address rapidly evolving battlefield challenges and overcome threats.

  • Pentagon requests 30-day extension for re-awarding JEDI

    August 12, 2020 | International, C4ISR, Security

    Pentagon requests 30-day extension for re-awarding JEDI

    Andrew Eversden WASHINGTON — The U.S. Department of Defense has requested 30 extra days to review vendor proposals as it prepares to make another award decision for its massive enterprise cloud contract, according to a Monday night court filing. The DoD is currently reviewing new revised proposals for its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, which it awarded to Microsoft over Amazon Web Services in October last year. In the filing, the DoD said that it “recently identified the need to reopen limited discussions related to certain aspects of the offerors' pricing proposals.” The request, made in the Court of Federal Claims, is yet another delay for the controversial JEDI cloud. The department was supposed to re-award the contract by Aug. 17 after receiving a 120-day stay to take corrective action on the contract. It's now asking to delay that decision to Sept. 16. “During the remand, DoD has identified areas of concern with respect to the revised proposals received from both offerors, resulting in multiple solicitation amendments, rounds of proposal revisions, and exchanges with the offerors,” the court filing said. AWS, which filed the protest late last year in the Court of Federal Claims after losing the contract, argues that the department made several technical errors while evaluating its proposal and also accuses President Donald Trump of political interference in the contract. AWS does not oppose the Pentagon's new motion, the court document said. In late July, DoD CIO Dana Deasy told reporters that the DoD would “probably sometimes towards the very end of August, barring any last minute, unforeseen additional issues that are raised.” The court filing says that the department “anticipates” that the re-evaluation process will wrap up in early September. The JEDI cloud has been delayed continuously throughout the entirety of the procurement process. Last year, the initial award decision was delayed for months due to a pre-award protest by Oracle. Earlier this year work on JEDI was further delayed when the court placed a temporary restraining order on any work on the JEDI cloud, finding that AWS was “likely to succeed” in proving DoD erred in the evaluation process. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/it-networks/2020/08/11/pentagon-requests-30-day-extension-for-re-awarding-jedi/

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