Photo By Staff Sgt. Ashley Cohen | Spc. Brie L. Bentley, a satellite communication systems operator-maintainers, with A...... read more read more
FORT GORDON, Ga.— Mission success in the U.S. Army relies heavily on a balance of efficiency in equipment and personnel but is hardly achieved without both.
Faced with upgraded equipment and unpracticed personnel, signal Soldiers of the 35th Signal Brigade (Theater Tactical) and cyber Soldiers of the Cyber Protection Team 152 connected for training at Forward Operating Base Ready, Fort Gordon, Georgia, Jan. 19-23.
In order to test their new server stacks both the CPT 152 and 35th TTSB network operations (NetOps) required an active link, which the 67th Signal Battalion (Expeditionary), 35th TTSB, was already scheduled to provide to a 442nd Signal Battalion’s Basic Officer Leaders Course class.
The mission provided the conditions for the 67th ESB Satellite Transportable Terminal and Joint Network Node teams to experience something new as well.
“It seems like this is going to be the way of the future as far as the cyber protection,” said Staff Sgt. Kyle Jones, satellite communications operations noncommissioned officer, A Company, 67th ESB. “It let us look into how our configurations are now and how we are going to have to change them in order to supplement the cyber protection teams.”
The 67th teams were faced with challenges at first while working to best accommodate the CPT 152’s systems, added Jones, but all obstacles were overcome by his highly competent Soldiers.
“They have a lot of programs and applications that need certain permissions within our network to actually run and look at the information coming across the network, so we’ve had to figure out the commands to input into our routers and switches to allow that to happen,” said Jones. “That’s been the biggest thing here, making everything talk.”
The CPT 152 required live communication to use their scanners on an active network to scan check for vulnerabilities.
“We’ve got a mission coming up in Europe so this is exactly what we will be doing; going out to a small little FOB or something like that and setting up and monitoring,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Erik Averill, cyber planner, CPT 152 who had about 12 other CPT 152 Soldiers with him.
At FOB Ready, the CPT 152 team worked on their fly away kit, which is a server stack consisting of all of their required tools, and NIKSUN, Inc. equipment, added Averill.
“I think one of the biggest lessons on the collaboration that took place was the discovery of the lack of support for a needed protocol on a piece of equipment,” said Averill. “We were testing for an upcoming mission and had we not discovered this now, it could have been a headache down the road.”
The training activity was the first time both the CPT 152 and the 35th TTSB worked together and provided unique experiences for both sides.
“This really helped us figure out what we need to do in order to support the cyber teams when they come out and want to test their tools out,” said Chief Warrant Officer 3 Siwatu Spikes, network manager and technician, 35th TTSB. “It gives us an opportunity to see how they capture the traffic so that we can actually defend our networks.”
The CPT 152 team also familiarized with the new Tactical Network Operations Management System and their Battle Command Common Server that the 35th TTSB NetOps team was testing for the first after a month of in-class training.
“It slices up all those hardware resources on that machine and allocates to the virtual machines,” said Warrant Officer Kenneth Foringer, automations officer technician, 35th TTSB about the TNMS and BCCS. “So one machine that has the power of all those machines basically hosts all of those machines virtually.”
The server stacks nearly halve their equipment requirement and have subsequently cut power and environmental requirements, added Foringer.
“It is an upgrade and a down size in equipment. You’re not losing capability, you’re reducing your footprint as far as physical hardware,” said Spikes.
The equipment itself and the entire training experience served to represent the U.S. military’s step into the future where less equipment does more and signal and cyber operate as one.
| Date Taken: | 01.23.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 01.29.2016 17:53 |
| Story ID: | 187445 |
| Location: | FORT GORDON, GA, US |
| Web Views: | 130 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Signal and cyber connect to validate new equipment, by SSG Ashley Cohen, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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