Defending your network from attack may seem like an exercise in warfare, and in the view of Dell Vice President Barry Hensley, it should seem that way. Hensley, a retired U.S. Army colonel, said battlefield preparation strategies can be effective in warding off cyberattacks, reports NetworkWorld's Tim Greene.

A military combat framework known as observe, orient, decide and act (OODA), can be beneficial for businesses trying to detect and fight off attacks, Hensley told an audience at Interop last week. "If you can OODA before the enemy can, I believe you can defend a network," he said.

Cyber criminals prepare for their attacks in much the same way that military commanders do, Hensley said. Some try out their weapons in one industry before they deploy them on their real targets. They engage in a form of "operational preparation of the battlefield," which gives them a base from which to launch an attack when the right time comes. "[They] get a foothold in as many networks as possible so they can use it at the time and place of their choosing," he said.

In one attack that Hensley investigated, five contractors working on a single Pentagon project were attacked via a cloud provider's network. Once the malware penetrated the contractors' networks, they were supposed to locate files and then contact a command and control server in the cloud provider's network. The data was then sent to six Internet drop sites online, including four in China, Hensley said.

For more:
- see Tim Greene's article at NetworkWorld

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