The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) relies too much on commercial software, doesn’t know who is creating the software, and faces other significant cybersecurity problems, witnesses told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee Thursday. The U.S. military’s use of commercial, off-the-shelf software has yielded fast improvements in software and cost-savings benefits for U.S. taxpayers over the last 20 years, but such software has its downside, said Professor Eugene Spafford, director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University. “Most of those products are not written to be used in an environment where there is a significant threat,” Spafford told the House Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities. “We have … attacks being committed by hackers, by anarchists, by criminals, probably by foreign intelligence services. The (commercial) products have not been designed to be reliable or robust under those kinds of circumstances.” Full Story
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