Army Tops Air Force, Navy

In the midst of a computer's worst nightmare -- malicious files, malware and corrupted Web servers -- the unlikeliest of responders burrows in and wages a winning defense. It's the U.S. Army, a military branch that's not exactly synonymous with cybersecurity.

"The Army has definitely lagged behind," said Capt. Timothy J. Tomes, cybersecurity course manager for the Army's School of Information Technology, "but we're working hard to catch up."

Is it ever. During the SANS Institute's Netwars competition on Saturday, a capture-the-flag game, the Army outplayed a broad cross section of opponents from commercial companies, educational institutions, government agencies, and other military branches. Six of the Army's officers placed in the top 10 overall, and Tomes won the whole thing.

Netwars isn't the definitive measurement for all things cybersecurity, but the Army's successful showing says a lot about what its learned. The competition is based on the analysis of artifacts and the implementation of cyber techniques like forensics and penetration testing. Players have to answer a gateway question before they can enter and play one of the game's five levels.

"It's sort of like a Nintendo game, but that's how the real world is too," said Ed Skoudis, the game's creator. "They're able to rapidly move up to the level that their skill contains, and fight from there."

With the leadership of Tomes, the Army's signal corps has formed a program called 255S Cyber Security Specialist that brings in experts to teach these fundamentals. The program covers hacker methodologies, exploit development, forensics, penetration testing, continuous monitoring and audit. Although Tomes is the first to admit that the Army is not as far along in training a cybersecurity workforce as the Navy and Air Force, it's starting to take legitimate strides forward.

"The Navy and Air Force have been at this much longer so naturally they are further along in the process, however, where I think we can have an advantage is we have learned from their mistakes and growing pains through great partnerships with our sister service cyber training organizations," said Tomes.

The real competition though is not between military branches. In the real world, attacks against U.S. computer systems are becoming increasingly prevalent and complex by rogue nation states and independent hackers.

"As the threat evolves so will the training," added Tomes. "What we have now is a very good starting point for the Army when it comes to cyber operations an defending against the threat."