One of the biggest hurdles the Air Force faces in safeguarding information in the cyber realm is dealing with social media, according to Frank Konieczny, the service’s chief technology officer. “Social media is a problem for us,” he said on June 19 at the Cyber Intelligence USA conference in Arlington, Va. “When our airmen come in, they are young, they are used to full expression of everything that they do, and we find that they have a problem with not openly expressing things that are occurring at the base,” he said. Citing the example of an airman updating a status to reflect that he was off to fire a missile, Konieczny pointed out that such innocuous-seeming updates could compromise the base mission. Some new airmen “can’t get past that phase of telling everybody everything. … There are problems with them coming into an environment which is totally restrictive,” he said.
In the face of Chinese war plans to disrupt U.S. command-and-control networks in the event of a conflict, the Air Force needs to focus less on its “connect everything” efforts and prepare its combat aviators to fight without a constant connection to higher-ups, according to a new report from AFA’s…
