Cyberattacks Target Air Force Apps

Lt. Gen. William Lord, the Air Force chief information officer, said cyberattackers have shifted their tactics from trying to breach firewalls to penetrating applications and said the service has serious application vulnerabilities.

Lord said unspecified cyber enemies used to be banging away at our firewalls. They're not any longer. "The enemy is banging away at our applications," the Air Force News Service reported on Wednesday.

Lord, speaking to a business group at the Electronic Systems Center at Hanscom Air Force Base, Mass., said the service's applications have been shown vulnerable to such attacks. The Air Force has more than 19,000 information technology applications, Lord said. The center's IT Center of Excellence at Maxwell Air Force Base-Gunter Annex in Alabama examined about 200 of those apps and found "all of them had over 50 vulnerabilities," he said.

Lord said the Air Force needs to focus on IT security but not at the expense of usefulness. "Security without utility is of little value; and utility without security is far too dangerous," he said, emphasizing the service needs to strike the correct balance between the two.