U.S. Army makes the switch to Apple

[Maxintosh]

Apples For The Army

 

 

Given Apple's marketing toward the young and the trendy, you wouldn't expect the U.S. Army to be much of a customer. Lieutenant Colonel C.J. Wallington is hoping hackers won't expect it either. Wallington, a division chief in the Army's office of enterprise information systems, says the military is quietly working to integrate Macintosh computers into its systems to make them harder to hack. That's because fewer attacks have been designed to infiltrate Mac computers, and adding more Macs to the military's computer mix makes it tougher to destabilize a group of military computers with a single attack, Wallington says.

 

This past year was a particularly tough one for military cybersecurity. Cyberspies infiltrated a Pentagon computer system in June and stole unknown quantities of e-mail data, according to a September report by the Financial Times. Later in September, industry sources told Forbes.com that major military contractors, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon had also been hacked.

 

The Army's push to use Macs to help protect its computing corps got its start in August 2005, when General Steve Boutelle, the Army's chief information officer, gave a speech calling for more diversity in the Army's computer vendors. He argued the approach would both increase competition among military contractors and strengthen its IT defenses.

 

Though Apple machines are still pricier than their Windows counterparts, the added security they offer might be worth the cost, says Wallington. He points out that Apple's X Serve servers, which are gradually becoming more commonplace in Army data centers, are proving their mettle. "Those are some of the most attacked computers there are. But the attacks used against them are designed for Windows-based machines, so they shrug them off," he says.

 

Apple, which declined to comment, has long argued its hardware is less hackable than comparable PCs. Jonathan Broskey, a former Apple employee who now heads the Army's Apple program, argues that the Unix core at the center of the Mac OS operating system makes it easier to lock down a Mac than a Windows platform.

 

Still, relative to corporate cybersecurity, Lieutenant Colonel Wallington points out, the stakes are much higher. A leaked deployment order, for instance, might reveal the path of a supply truck and the points where it could be sabotaged, he says.

 

"This is information that affects the lives of soldiers and the civilians we're trying protect," Broskey adds. "It has to be safeguarded."link

[muitommy]

unix rules

[thespottedelf]

still can't believe they haven't written their own os or paid apple too..

 

its ridiculous that they are using a consumer product even if its fire walled up the wasue...

[schwartz]

^ i agree with this statement, but creating a whole os seems like a bit overkill. interesting article tho!

[U.C.]

Yeah why bother reinventing the wheel. Governments and other Corporations all use UNIX derivatives for majority of their work.

[vvxiao]

And unix are unable to die,24/7 almost