War Game

We have recently watched a short video on US military computer science cadets at West Point who are learning everything about cyber attacks and hacking and how to defend a network from these attacks. The cadets played a war game and competed amongst 7 military academies against expert hackers from National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA hackers tried to infiltrate the networks to bring down services and infect computers among other kind many other kinds of attacks. In intense environment, under pressure the cadets successfully examined and blocked unsafe internet addresses, cleaned infected computer, perform various other tasks to recover partially erased hard drive, bring up affected services, etc.
These cadets learned hacking technique from the best hackers at the government security agencies and are held responsible at the highest ethical standards. The cadets are scheduled to be deployed to foreign countries where they will serve and put their experiences to work. It is important to note that we may see soldiers killed in wars but not aware of internet attacks, however cyber attacks are very real threats against our nation.
After watching the video, our class was divided into two groups to play a similar war game. I was a part of the attack team and following are the kind of attacks we planned to launch against the network that defender team was protecting.
1. Electro-Magnetic Pulse Attack.
2. Denial of Service Attacks.
3. Social Engineering.
4. Spear Phishing Government Employees/Officials.
5. Penetration attacks.
6. Battlefield.
7. Equipment Disruption.
8. Cyber Espionage.
9. Attack on US’s command and control.
10. Compromised counterfeit hardware.
11. Wireless and wired network sniffers.
12. Spam propaganda.
13. Packet spoofing.
14. GUI intruder tools.
15. Executable code attacks (against browsers).
16. "Stealth" and other advanced scanning techniques.
17. Windows-based remote controllable Trojans (Back Orifice).
18. BotNets and Zombies.
19. Conventional warfare (i.e. storming beaches) (data from field to policy makers).
20. Trade wars (economic warfare).
21. Attack of critical infrastructure and associated IT networks (i.e. bringing down the one northeast electrical grid that runs the entire eastern seaboard).
22. Price manipulation of commodities.