For Years, the Pentagon Hooked Everything to the Internet. Now, it's a 'Big, big problem'

Once upon a time, very smart people in the Pentagon believed that connecting sensitive networks, expensive equipment, and powerful weapons to the open Internet was a swell idea. This ubiquitous connectivity among devices and objects -- what we now call the Internet of Things -- would allow them to collect performance data to help design new weapons, monitor equipment remotely, and realize myriad other benefits. The risks were less assiduously catalogued.

That strategy has spread huge vulnerabilities across the Defense Department, its networks, and much of what the defense industry has spent the last several decades creating. But in a world where such public interfaces are points of vulnerability, Adm Michael Rogers, the commander of Cyber Command, said adversaries develop strategies based on stealing Pentagon data, and then fashion copycat weapons like China’s J-31 fighter. "That’s where we find ourselves now. So one of the things I try to remind people is: it took us decades to get here. We are not going to fix this set of problems in a few years,” Adm Rogers said. “We have to prioritize it, figure out where is the greatest vulnerability.”