Media Scare Tactics

On Monday, ISIS supporters claiming to be a “Cyber Caliphate” hacked US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) Twitter and YouTube accounts.  As soon as it happened, media outlets went crazy with headlines like “CENTCOM Hacked” and various other wordings that portrayed the same image.  The problem with this is that CENTCOM, as in the DOD organization, did not get hacked.  The attackers never got into an actual DOD system; they attacked the CENTCOM accounts on YouTube and Twitter.  This differentiation needs to be made.  The terrorists want us to be scared, they want us to retreat and live in fear of everything.  By leading with these headlines, the mainstream media is doing a disservice to the American people; they are essentially saying that now nothing is safe, not even DOD networks. 

These ISIS supporters also published documents that contained phone numbers and names of personnel at the command, yet these documents were made out to seem like they contained nuclear launch codes or something; these documents were unclassified but marked as For Official Use Only (FOUO).  All personal data is protected under what is known as Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and is supposed to be treated as sensitive.  In theory that’s a good idea, but in reality it does not work like that.  Having been in a leadership position in the military, and even working within the Cyberwarfare realm, I know how hard it is to keep information from falling into the wrong hands, but there is certain information that you “protect” more than others.  The recall bill (or recall roster, depending on which branch you’re talking about) is one of those documents that floats around freely.  I remember always having a copy of the list for every individual in my division on my personal computer and my phone, so if something came up and I wasn’t at work I could make contact with my people and let them know what was going on.  Why do I bring this up?  The point is that the document with names and phone numbers is floating around in various people’s personal emails and probably even freely accessible with a few simple Google searches.  Just because this document happens to belong to CENTCOM does not mean that all of a sudden the DOD and the Global Information Grid (GIG) is under attack anymore than it already is on a daily basis. 

Unlike private companies, the DOD has multiple safeguards in place to help protect their information systems, and those safeguards have increased substantially in recent years to keep up with the changing cyber landscape.  I won’t delve into the safeguards because the majority of them are classified, but I assure you they are in place.  This does not mean, however, that it would be impossible to penetrate the systems, it just makes it harder. 

In the end, we all need to be reminded that everyone and every organization is vulnerable to a cyber attack, and in my opinion, that will the next big attack that occurs.  It could occur within the electric grid, the financial system, or any other infrastructure system that we use daily and do not even think about.  That does not mean that we must live in fear day in and day out. The mainstream media needs to take responsibility for that by ensuring they are not using fear mongering headlines just to get clicks on their stories and increase their ratings.