Ops and Intel update

Major General Charles Dunlap, the provocative Air Force bigwig who recently mused about disbanding either the Army or the Marines -- and mocked the "boots-on-the-ground zealots" and "neo-Luddites" who "quot[e] counterinsurgency manuals from the horse cavalry era" -- is at it again.

In a new article for Defense News, he wonders aloud whether the next phase of the counterinsurgency in Iraq should be... bombing Iran's oil refineries, in retaliation for Tehran's support of Iraqi guerrillas.

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"Existing UUVs have the capability to detect mines but have to go back to the ship and download their information so the ship can see what the UUV sees," Scott says. Talisman just surfaces, sends out a radio signal and waits for a reply. "Talisman can also relay data to the ship by way of a buoy."

Phpntoaacam "Existing UUVs are mostly single-mission," Scott continues. "Talisman can do mine warfare; Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance; it can be configured for Electronic Warfare, for the littorals and for Anti-Submarine Warfare — with the proper sonar and torpedoes. You could put in a navigation system for river navigation."

Talisman looks like a sleek window- and wheel-less compact car — and in fact is built from the same materials as modern racecars. It has four little jets on the bottom and a weapons bay for carrying torpedoes, smaller UUVs or charges for destroying mines. The sleek construction of the current model is an improvement over the earliest Talisman prototype (pictured), which was blockier and heavier. Besides being slippier, Scott says Talisman has more horsepower than most UUVs and can make headway against a five-knot current.

http://blog.wired.com/defense/

http://tinyurl.com/3cdv36

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Pharming Attacks Through DNS Cache Poisoning

A month ago, a detailed assessment of a recently released vulnerability in BIND9 was conducted by Amit Klein to highlight the wide impact typical nameserver vulnerabilities have in general, and this one in particular. Now that an exploit is available as well, the possibility for large scale pharming attacks in an automated fashion, becomes fully realistic :

"A program has appeared on the Milw0rm exploit portal which is able to exploit the recently reported vulnerability in the BIND9 nameserver. Transaction IDs can be predicted or guessed relatively easily, so the cache of a vulnerable nameserver can be poisoned. Phishers can use cache poisoning for pharming attacks on users by manipulating the assignment of a server name to an IP address. Even if the user enters the name of his bank in the address line of his browser manually, he will still be taken to a counterfeit web page."

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SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 - At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras
> are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon
> be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed
> company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and
> detect unusual activity.
>
> Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across
> Shenxhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with
> powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued
> to most citizens.
>
> Data on the chip will include not just the citizen's name and address
> but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity,
> police record, medical insurance status and landlord's phone number.
> Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement
> of China's controversial 'one child' policy. Plans are being studied
> to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases
> charged to the card.
>
> Security experts describe China's plans as the world's largest effort
> to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the
> activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the
> technology can be used to violate civil rights.