back to article Brace yourselves for the 'terabyte (sic) of death', warns US army IT boss

The outgoing head of the Defense Information Systems Agency, which handles computer security for the US Department of Defense, has warned a massive cyber-attack is "looming" at the American military's door. Over lunch on Thursday, Army Lieutenant General Alan Lynn, who retires in a few months, told the Armed Forces …

  1. RichardB
    Stop

    slang v gospel

    I see that you call him out on his terabyte, but you breeze by his 600 gig.

    I'm pretty sure he wasn't addressing his network admins, so it really doesn't matter does it... you knew what he was talking about so the communication was successful; still a nice bit of internet pedantry to take a cheap shot is always worth a wry smile from certain quarters.

    1. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      Re: slang v gospel

      "you breeze by his 600 gig"

      We were charitably hoping he meant 600 gigabit per second.

      C.

    2. Kuddy

      Re: slang v gospel

      Correct journalism is important. Unlike both our comments.

    3. StargateSg7

      Re: slang v gospel

      Ha ha ha ha ha I LAUGH AT A MERE 600 Gigabytes!

      EVERY SINGLE DAY I deal with now 2 to 4 PETABYTES of data (2000 to 4000 PETABYTES!) just on our INTERNAL online storage network! Our offline storage is now PAST one Exabyte (1000 PETABYTES) and our online files run from a mere two gigabytes to 100+ Terabyte 4K and 8k video files. The tech honchos have said at the rate we are going, we will be in the EXABYTE+ range PER DAY by the end of the year! So much data that our render farm will SOON CHOKE on the video data! Good thing we have a 1500+ GPU Render Farm now! i.e. we now have 3.4 PetaFLOPS of total 64-bit processing GPU horsepower and 6.8 PetaFLOPS when doing 32 bit processing. We're second in all of Canada ONLY to Simon Fraser University's 10+ PetaFLOP system!

      Sooooo......600 Gigabytes IS MERE CHILD'S PLAY !!!!

      1. Mark 85
        Devil

        Re: slang v gospel

        All the caps.... is that you Bombastic Bob?

        1. StargateSg7

          Re: slang v gospel

          No....This is StargateSG7 --- I design 60 GHz Fully Optoelectronic Super-CPU's containing multiple layers of 8192 by 8192 arrays of 128 bit Floating Point and Integer Stream processors. On weekends I dream of a younger Pamela Anderson (i.e. during her Baywatch days!) in all her naked glory and pontificate with my fellow "Get Off My Lawn!" types over Tea and Crumpets wailing LOUDLY at just how BADLY "The Register" is turning into the Daily Mail these days, or worse, the NEW VERSION of the The Weekly World News with ever uglier 3D renderings of Bat Boy !!!!

          Bombastic Bob was recently tied up by his obviously delusional ex-lover and flogged nearly to death with a wet noodle. However, we expect him to FULLY RECOVER to continue his somnolent diatribes against programmers wearing plaid socks, women who find him unsexy and loutish, and against Hello Kitty cosplay groups who REFUSE to let him into their worldwide conferences!

          That said, he is currently under strict doctor's orders to refrain from continuously hitting the EXCLAMATION KEY !!!! and BANNED from putting multiple hits on the ENTER button!

          ....it looks really dim if these restrictions persist greater than 42 hours...... :-( :-( :-(

          1. hopkinse
            Alien

            Re: slang v gospel

            Has destroyallmonsters been resurrected from cryo suspension?

          2. Alistair
            Windows

            Re: slang v gospel

            Ahhh @ the star child stargate thing.

            I see.

            You are Bombastic Bob's 9 year old agile devops developer offspring.

            1. StargateSg7

              Re: slang v gospel

              Bombastic Bob is actually my demented cousin who hates everyone except me!

              He's so demented, he removes ALL parenthesis from ALL of his employees' source code

              upon review and says FIX THIS when we gives it back to them. He rinses and repeats

              but pays well enough that they don't care...We wish him well upon his recovery from

              being flogged with a wet noodle by his also likely-demented ex!

              P.S. I am the C++/C, JAVA, Pascal, Basic, Python GENIUS of a coder younger 2nd cousin!

              I eat discarded .357 shells soaked in chocolate milk for my breakfast!

              I code 21x21 pixel convolution filters with my left-eye closed!

              AND I like blondes with bazoookas the size of Pennsylvania

              and lips completely puffed up with 20 gallons of fish oil byproducts!

              BWAAAAH!!!!!!

              1. StargateSg7

                Re: slang v gospel

                P.S. My cousin Bombastic Bob is AMERICAN while I am Canadian...Quite the Difference!

                But I should note I have quite the contact and visits with him so I guess his values are

                SOMEWHAT rubbing off on me....

                1. Intractable Potsherd

                  Re: slang v gospel

                  It sounds to me that you are more closely related to A Man from Mars :-)

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: slang v gospel

          "All the caps.... is that you Bombastic Bob?"

          No, didn't mention liberals or guns.

          1. StargateSg7

            Re: slang v gospel

            Nope! It's Libtards I despise and Deflagration-based Hard Projectile Emissions Systems that I am part and party too based upon the 2nd espousement and declaration of innate and immutable personal entitlements!

      2. Sampler

        Re: slang v gospel

        @StargateSg7

        of unwanted data attacking your network ontop of b.a.u?

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: slang v gospel

        600gbyte/sec is 49PB a day

        600gbit/sec is 6.4PB a day

        So your tiny ass 2-4PB/day is childs play.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: slang v gospel

          Exactly what I was thinking.

          Data in motion and data a rest, are two very different things.

          We were able to infer from the article that the IT Boss was talking about ‘data in motion” even though he was using ‘data at rest’ terms. It sounds like his concern was about massive DDos attacks against military installations. Also, the devices that are in place (to protect against this) are insufficient...

          The comment bragging about their company’s data size repository seems to be from a Marketing person...

          It reminds me about some guy bragging about his “nuclear button” on his desk being larger than the other guys...

      4. Pascal Monett Silver badge
        Stop

        Re: slang v gospel

        "I deal with now 2 to 4 PETABYTES of data"

        If they are on your internal network, then they are not coming in on your Internet connection.

        Call us back when you have 4 PB of data coming down the wire from outside and tell us how that went.

        1. StargateSg7

          Re: slang v gospel

          Kinda funny you asked that....I just finished a multi-stream 4k and 8k video data download from our Toronto Server to Vancouver (5000 km distance) that was over 3 Exabytes (3000 PETABYTES) into our EMC tape library (OH YES! We still use TAPE because NO disk drive system can hold 3 Exabytes at a decent COST!) It took over 72 hours even with our multiple OC-768 lines!

          On a technical basis, we are BIGGER than Akamai and smaller only to Google, the NSA, Apple and Microsoft when it comes to daily data bandwidth and data storage. By the end of the year 2018, we will SURPASS Apple and Microsoft and become #3 in the world for data and bandwidth....!!!

      5. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: slang v gospel

        If PB is more than Pb... Then PETABYTES must be more than petabytes!

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: slang v gospel

      is this .mil 'terabyte' somehow related to their 'teradollar' spending/appropriations budget [$n x 10^12]

      or I am just getting confused by the 'virtual reality' in our media

  2. Ole Juul

    Logic

    "We're prepared for it, so we know it's coming."

    Shouldn't that be the other way around?

    1. Mephistro
      Devil

      Re: Logic

      Not in the universe of the Industrial-Military Complex!

    2. Geoff May (no relation)
      Joke

      Re: Logic

      .gnimoc s'ti wonk ew os ,ti rof deraperp er'eW

    3. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Logic

      it's one of those unknown knowns

  3. Anonymous South African Coward Bronze badge

    New military equipment was also a challenge for The Green Machine's ranks of BOFHs. He gave the example of the F-35, which he called the "flying mega-computer," that requires secure data stream to send information and receive commands from ground controllers and defense systems. Lynn also said his agency had developed systems that allowed fighters on the ground to watch live video streams from drones on mobile phones.

    *cough*

    Can I interest Sir in a copy of "Superiority" by a Mr Arthur C Clarke? Highly recommended.

  4. K

    the F-35 ... requires secure data stream to .... receive commands from ground controllers

    All because, pilots are nothing more that organic drones!

  5. AdrianMontagu

    The Military is connected to the Internet ?

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      "The Military is connected to the Internet ?"

      Remember all those early three letter top domains? .edu, .com and ..... .mil?

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Remind me again the origins of the Internet?

      Oh yes, ARPANET funded by errmmm the Department of Defence.

  6. Aodhhan

    Grammar Police

    Iain,

    Whenever you write an article, don't criticize anyone's grammar. You have no leg to stand on. I counted at least 12 different grammatical errors by you, and this isn't counting your improper use of passive voice, and lack of active voice. It appears you have little understanding of subject, verb and objects when writing as well.

    A real journalist sticks to the facts about the subject itself, without attempting to belittle anyone associated with the subject.

  7. Nimby
    Trollface

    The Terrorbyte!

    Who knows, maybe the "terabyte of death" is more like the peak of the bell curve in a usage over time line chart with millisecond accuracy? It might be unfair to call it terabyte-per-second because it wasn't really sustainable...

    Or maybe the entire cumulative attack constituted 1TB of data? It is only a .mil after all. ;)

    Of course he's an officer (a General no less), not a working man, so one must take anything he says (or any alleged relation to real skills) with a grain of salt ... on top of a bag of salt ... on the truckload of salt. Now, had a Master Sergeant given us some statistics, we'd know what was meant.

    "He said to be ready for Pb attacks, so I made a copy of our RoHS compliance sheet."

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