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3rd Party Risk Management , Critical Infrastructure Security , Cyberwarfare / Nation-State Attacks

The U.S. National Security Agency has issued a warning about two hacking techniques that could allow threat actors to access cloud resources by bypassing authentication mechanisms.

See Also: The SASE Model: A New Approach to Security

The warning comes after a week's worth of revelations over the SolarWinds breach that has affected government agencies as well as corporations, including Microsoft, FireEye, Intel and Nvida (see: SolarWinds Hack: Lawmakers Demand Answers).

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, commenting on the breach, said in a Friday evening radio interview that "the Russians engaged in this activity."

"I can't say much more as we're still unpacking precisely what it is, and I'm sure some of it will remain classified," Pompeo said, according to a transcript provided by the State Department. "But suffice it to say there was a significant effort to use a piece of third-party software to essentially embed code inside of U.S. government systems, and it now appears systems of private companies and companies and governments across the world as well. This was a very significant effort, and I think it's the case that now we can say pretty clearly that it was the Russians that engaged in this activity."

In a pair of tweets on Saturday, President Donald Trump appeared to question whether Russia was involved in the hacking operation and opened up the possibility that China may have played a role (see: President Trump Downplays Impact of SolarWinds Breach).

"The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality," Trump tweeted. "Russia, Russia, Russia is the priority chant when anything happens because Lamestream is, for mostly financial reasons, petrified of discussing the possibility that it may be China (it may!)."

The NSA advisory does not specify whether the nation-state hackers behind the SolarWinds breach used these same tactics, techniques and procedures to compromise various networks and gain additional privileges, but the advisory notes threat actors could use these methods to steal credentials and maintain persistent access.

"Initial access can be established through a number of means, including known and unknown vulnerabilities," according to the NSA alert. "The recent SolarWinds Orion code compromise is one serious example of how on-premises systems can be compromised, leading to abuse of federated authentication and malicious cloud access."

The NSA adds these particular tactics and methods described in the alert are not new and have been used by threat actors since 2017.

The two techniques described by NSA involve hacking of cloud resources using either compromised authentication tokens or through compromised system administration accounts in the Microsoft Azure platform. The agency adds, however, that these techniques can be replicated in other cloud platforms as well.

The NSA notes that its latest alert builds on a previous warning about techniques that Russian-linked hackers were using to exploit a vulnerability in several VMware products. The company has since issued a fix for this bug, and users are encouraged to apply it as soon as possible (see: NSA: Russian Hackers Exploiting VMware Vulnerability).

This alert describes two scenarios where the attackers have already compromised the local network and have gained access to the authentication mechanisms that are used to access cloud resources.

In the first scenario, the threat actors begin by compromising on-premises components of federated single sign-on authentication systems that use a single identification and password to log into several systems, the advisory notes.

The attackers then steal credentials or private keys that are used to sign Security Assertion Markup Language, or SAML, tokens used for authentication and authorization between cloud service providers and its tenants or users, the NSA notes.

"Using the private keys, the actors then forge trusted authentication tokens to access cloud resources," according to the NSA alert. "If the malicious cyber actors are unable to obtain an on-premises signing key, they would attempt to gain sufficient administrative privileges within the cloud tenant to add a malicious certificate trust relationship for forging SAML tokens."

In the second scenario, the threat actors use compromised administrator accounts to assign credentials to cloud application services. The actors then call for the applications' credentials to gain automated access to cloud resources, the advisory adds.

The NSA adds that attacks against the cloud infrastructure do not use vulnerabilities in the cloud components, but instead manipulate the "trust" needed for performing authentication, assigned privileges and the SAML tokens.

"If any of these components is compromised, then the trust in the federated identity system can be abused for unauthorized access," the advisory notes.

Brendan O'Connor, CEO and co-founder of security firm AppOmni, notes the tactics described by NSA particularly make third-party apps that connect to cloud services more susceptible to attacks, especially with more organizations now working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

"It's not that our premise tools have failed, but the data has moved to where they can't see it," O'Connor tells Information Security Media Group. "Getting visibility into what third-party applications are already connected to your cloud applications should be one of the top priorities for security teams."

Because the attacks mainly take advantage of Security Assertion Markup Language in cloud platforms, the NSA recommends several steps that cloud service providers and users can adopt to prevent breaches using the scenarios described in the alert. These mitigation methods include:

The NSA also recommends auditing of the tokens to identify any disparities in their activities. This can be done by either auditing the creation and use of service principal credentials or by auditing the assignment of credentials to applications that allow for non-interactive sign-in by the application.

While the mitigation strategies described by the NSA are meant to provide guidance for the National Security System, Department of Defense, and Defense Industrial Base network administrators, these methods can be applied to any network.

Managing Editor Scott Ferguson contributed to this report.

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NSA Warns of Hacking Tactics That Target Cloud Resources - BankInfoSecurity.com

In the wake of the SolarWinds incident, critics have pointed to budget and personnel imbalances between offensive and defensive missions. As Alex Stamos pointed out in the Washington Post, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security has only 2,200 employees for a mission that includes protecting all sixteen critical infrastructure sectors and all federal agencies while the National Security Agency (NSA) alone has more than 40,000 employees. The Department of Defenses (DOD) Cyber Command has over 12,000 personnel, including 6,000 military members.

While total spending on cyber missions at NSA is classified, what is known about federal spending suggests priorities skewed toward offense. As Jason Healey pointed out last spring, the DODs cybersecurity budget is significantly larger than the cybersecurity budgets of all civilian components combined. The federal government spends more than half a billion dollars per year on the headquarters elements of Cyber Command alone and only $400 million on cyber diplomacy at the State department. All of CISAs budget adds up to about half of what DOD spends on just offensive cyber operations.

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The SolarWinds disaster clearly indicates that CISA and federal agencies will need more money in order to develop the capabilities necessary to detect and contain adversaries as capable as Russias Foreign Intelligence Service. Additional funds are also badly needed to scale out efforts to coordinate with the private sector, fund research that the market will not support, and bolster the security of critical infrastructure. That funding, however, should not come out of the current budgets or future budget growth on the offensive side of the equation.

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CFR experts investigate the impact of information and communication technologies on security, privacy, and international affairs.2-4 times weekly.

Since cybersecurity first became an issue of national import, cyber policy has been predicated on the idea of a public-private partnership, a term that is now nauseating to much of the community. Yet the phrase captures the reality that the federal government, unlike in other domains, does not assume ultimate responsibility for the security of systems it does not own or operate, including critical infrastructure. In terms of dollars and cents, what this means is that total spending on U.S. cybersecurity is actually heavily skewed toward defense not offense because all the cybersecurity spending in the private sector goes in the defense column.

Alongside DHSs 2,200 employees at CISA, the 6,000 cyber warriors in the Defense Department suggest an imbalance towards offense over defense until you recognize that only about 2,000 of these 6,000 are in units that carry out offensive cyber missions and these 2,000 people are the only people in the United States that are authorized to carry out offensive cyber operations. Even the NSAs 40,000 employees, only a fraction of which are focused on intelligence collection against adversary cyber operators, pale alongside the total cybersecurity workforce estimated at 750,000.

While estimates of total private sector spending in the United States range from $40 billion to $120 billion, even the lower end of that range is more than ten times the Pentagons budget for cyber operations and four times what data leaked from the Snowden disclosures suggested was the NSA's budget. Microsoft alone says that it spends $1 billion a year on cybersecurity, and JP Morgan also spends close to that amount.

No doubt CISA needs to grow several times over to carry out its mission, and other civilian agencies will need a large influx of funds to secure themselves, but relative percentages between defense and offense in the federal budget could look largely the same.

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Digital and Cyberspace Update

Digital and Cyberspace Policy program updates on cybersecurity, digital trade, internet governance, and online privacy.Bimonthly.

While the defense clearly failed, it is becoming increasingly clear that the intelligence community either failed to detect this campaign or lacked the ability to understand and communicate what they saw. Its also possible that the NSA supplied indications and warnings of the campaign to Cyber Command but offensive operators were spread too thin to engage and disrupt the activity. Either way, more spending, not less on offense, could be in the cards.

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No, the United States Does Not Spend Too Much on Cyber Offense - Council on Foreign Relations

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Lawmakers are urging President Donald Trump to walk back a threatened veto of the annual defense bill over non-defense policy issues because of the widespread, ongoing and potentially catastrophic hack of U.S. government and private sector systems.

The National Defense Authorization Act has a slate of cybersecurity provisions and its own cybersecurity section drawn from the recommendations of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission, including a measure to established a White House cybersecurity official whose job it would be to coordinate response in the event of emergencies like the SolarWinds hack.

"Given the recently revealed cyber hacks, it is more critical than ever that the President sign this bipartisan bill into law," Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) tweeted on Friday. King co-chairs the Solarium Commission.

Trump has threatened to veto the NDAA because it doesn't revoke liability protections for online platforms the Section 230 provision of the Communications Decency Act. Trump is also opposed to a measure to rename military bases that honor Confederate military leaders. Lawmakers from defense committees across both parties have urged Trump to sign the bill, which passed by large majorities in the House and Senate.

Separately, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, criticized Trump for "not taking this issue seriously enough."

"As we learn about the wider impact of this malign effort -- with the potential for wider compromise of critical global technology vendors and their products-- it is essential that we see an organized and concerted federal response," Warner said in an emailed statement. "It is extremely troubling that the President does not appear to be acknowledging, much less acting upon, the gravity of this situation."

NSA's mitigation guide

The National Security Administration released guidance on how to deny bad actors continued access to compromised systems by hardening identity and credential issuance and management. The Dec. 17 advisory does not mention SolarWinds by name but lays out guidance of how to prevent bad actors from generating tokens to provide access to cloud-based and on-premises systems, and how to detect abuse of credentials.

Microsoft President Brad Smith called the hack and its aftermath a "moment of reckoning" in a Dec. 17 blog post. "The attack unfortunately represents a broad and successful espionage-based assault on both the confidential information of the U.S. Government and the tech tools used by firms to protect them," Smith wrote. He said that while espionage is a fact of like, the attacks used in the SolarWinds hack, "has put at risk the technology supply chain for the broader economy."

Smith noted that in terms of governmental response to the burgeoning threat, "one ready-made opportunity is to establish a national cybersecurity director as recommended by theSolarium Commissionand provided for in the National Defense Authorization Act."

About the Author

Adam Mazmanian is executive editor of FCW.

Before joining the editing team, Mazmanian was an FCW staff writer covering Congress, government-wide technology policy and the Department of Veterans Affairs. Prior to joining FCW, Mazmanian was technology correspondent for National Journal and served in a variety of editorial roles at B2B news service SmartBrief. Mazmanian has contributed reviews and articles to the Washington Post, the Washington City Paper, Newsday, New York Press, Architect Magazine and other publications.

Click here for previous articles by Mazmanian. Connect with him on Twitter at @thisismaz.

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Lawmakers press Trump to sign NDAA in the wake of massive hack - FCW.com

Recent news articles have all been talking about the massive Russian cyber-attack against the United States, but thats wrong on two accounts. It wasnt a cyber-attack in international relations terms, it was espionage. And the victim wasnt just the US, it was the entire world. But it was massive, and it is dangerous.

Espionage is internationally allowed in peacetime. The problem is that both espionage and cyber-attacks require the same computer and network intrusions, and the difference is only a few keystrokes. And since this Russian operation isnt at all targeted, the entire world is at risk and not just from Russia. Many countries carry out these sorts of operations, none more extensively than the US. The solution is to prioritize security and defense over espionage and attack.

Heres what we know: Orion is a network management product from a company named SolarWinds, with over 300,000 customers worldwide. Sometime before March, hackers working for the Russian SVR previously known as the KGB hacked into SolarWinds and slipped a backdoor into an Orion software update. (We dont know how, but last year the companys update server was protected by the password solarwinds123 something that speaks to a lack of security culture.) Users who downloaded and installed that corrupted update between March and June unwittingly gave SVR hackers access to their networks.

This is called a supply-chain attack, because it targets a supplier to an organization rather than an organization itself and can affect all of a suppliers customers. Its an increasingly common way to attack networks. Other examples of this sort of attack include fake apps in the Google Play store, and hacked replacement screens for your smartphone.

SolarWinds has removed its customers list from its website, but the Internet Archive saved it: all five branches of the US military, the state department, the White House, the NSA, 425 of the Fortune 500 companies, all five of the top five accounting firms, and hundreds of universities and colleges. In an SEC filing, SolarWinds said that it believes fewer than 18,000 of those customers installed this malicious update, another way of saying that more than 17,000 did.

Thats a lot of vulnerable networks, and its inconceivable that the SVR penetrated them all. Instead, it chose carefully from its cornucopia of targets. Microsofts analysis identified 40 customers who were infiltrated using this vulnerability. The great majority of those were in the US, but networks in Canada, Mexico, Belgium, Spain, the UK, Israel and the UAE were also targeted. This list includes governments, government contractors, IT companies, thinktanks, and NGOs and it will certainly grow.

Once inside a network, SVR hackers followed a standard playbook: establish persistent access that will remain even if the initial vulnerability is fixed; move laterally around the network by compromising additional systems and accounts; and then exfiltrate data. Not being a SolarWinds customer is no guarantee of security; this SVR operation used other initial infection vectors and techniques as well. These are sophisticated and patient hackers, and were only just learning some of the techniques involved here.

Recovering from this attack isnt easy. Because any SVR hackers would establish persistent access, the only way to ensure that your network isnt compromised is to burn it to the ground and rebuild it, similar to reinstalling your computers operating system to recover from a bad hack. This is how a lot of sysadmins are going to spend their Christmas holiday, and even then they cant be sure. There are many ways to establish persistent access that survive rebuilding individual computers and networks. We know, for example, of an NSA exploit that remains on a hard drive even after it is reformatted. Code for that exploit was part of the Equation Group tools that the Shadow Brokers again believed to be Russia stole from the NSA and published in 2016. The SVR probably has the same kinds of tools.

Even without that caveat, many network administrators wont go through the long, painful, and potentially expensive rebuilding process. Theyll just hope for the best.

Its hard to overstate how bad this is. We are still learning about US government organizations breached: the state department, the treasury department, homeland security, the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories (where nuclear weapons are developed), the National Nuclear Security Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and many more. At this point, theres no indication that any classified networks were penetrated, although that could change easily. It will take years to learn which networks the SVR has penetrated, and where it still has access. Much of that will probably be classified, which means that we, the public, will never know.

And now that the Orion vulnerability is public, other governments and cybercriminals will use it to penetrate vulnerable networks. I can guarantee you that the NSA is using the SVRs hack to infiltrate other networks; why would they not? (Do any Russian organizations use Orion? Probably.)

While this is a security failure of enormous proportions, it is not, as Senator Richard Durban said, virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States While President-elect Biden said he will make this a top priority, its unlikely that he will do much to retaliate.

The reason is that, by international norms, Russia did nothing wrong. This is the normal state of affairs. Countries spy on each other all the time. There are no rules or even norms, and its basically buyer beware. The US regularly fails to retaliate against espionage operations such as Chinas hack of the Office of Personal Management (OPM) and previous Russian hacks because we do it, too. Speaking of the OPM hack, the then director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said: You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I dont think wed hesitate for a minute.

We dont, and Im sure NSA employees are grudgingly impressed with the SVR. The US has by far the most extensive and aggressive intelligence operation in the world. The NSAs budget is the largest of any intelligence agency. It aggressively leverages the USs position controlling most of the internet backbone and most of the major internet companies. Edward Snowden disclosed many targets of its efforts around 2014, which then included 193 countries, the World Bank, the IMF and the International Atomic Energy Agency. We are undoubtedly running an offensive operation on the scale of this SVR operation right now, and itll probably never be made public. In 2016, President Obama boasted that we have more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively.

He may have been too optimistic about our defensive capability. The US prioritizes and spends many times more on offense than on defensive cybersecurity. In recent years, the NSA has adopted a strategy of persistent engagement, sometimes called defending forward. The idea is that instead of passively waiting for the enemy to attack our networks and infrastructure, we go on the offensive and disrupt attacks before they get to us. This strategy was credited with foiling a plot by the Russian Internet Research Agency to disrupt the 2018 elections.

But if persistent engagement is so effective, how could it have missed this massive SVR operation? It seems that pretty much the entire US government was unknowingly sending information back to Moscow. If we had been watching everything the Russians were doing, we would have seen some evidence of this. The Russians success under the watchful eye of the NSA and US Cyber Command shows that this is a failed approach.

And how did US defensive capability miss this? The only reason we know about this breach is because, earlier this month, the security company FireEye discovered that it had been hacked. During its own audit of its network, it uncovered the Orion vulnerability and alerted the US government. Why dont organizations like the departments of state, treasury and homeland security regularly conduct that level of audit on their own systems? The governments intrusion detection system, Einstein 3, failed here because it doesnt detect new sophisticated attacks a deficiency pointed out in 2018 but never fixed. We shouldnt have to rely on a private cybersecurity company to alert us of a major nation-state attack.

If anything, the USs prioritization of offense over defense makes us less safe. In the interests of surveillance, the NSA has pushed for an insecure cellphone encryption standard and a backdoor in random number generators (important for secure encryption). The DoJ has never relented in its insistence that the worlds popular encryption systems be made insecure through back doors another hot point where attack and defense are in conflict. In other words, we allow for insecure standards and systems, because we can use them to spy on others.

We need to adopt a defense-dominant strategy. As computers and the internet become increasingly essential to society, cyber-attacks are likely to be the precursor to actual war. We are simply too vulnerable when we prioritize offense, even if we have to give up the advantage of using those insecurities to spy on others.

Our vulnerability is magnified as eavesdropping may bleed into a direct attack. The SVRs access allows them not only to eavesdrop, but also to modify data, degrade network performance, or erase entire networks. The first might be normal spying, but the second certainly could be considered an act of war. Russia is almost certainly laying the groundwork for future attack.

This preparation would not be unprecedented. Theres a lot of attack going on in the world. In 2010, the US and Israel attacked the Iranian nuclear program. In 2012, Iran attacked the Saudi national oil company. North Korea attacked Sony in 2014. Russia attacked the Ukrainian power grid in 2015 and 2016. Russia is hacking the US power grid, and the US is hacking Russias power grid just in case the capability is needed someday. All of these attacks began as a spying operation. Security vulnerabilities have real-world consequences.

Were not going to be able to secure our networks and systems in this no-rules, free-for-all every-network-for-itself world. The US needs to willingly give up part of its offensive advantage in cyberspace in exchange for a vastly more secure global cyberspace. We need to invest in securing the worlds supply chains from this type of attack, and to press for international norms and agreements prioritizing cybersecurity, like the 2018 Paris Call for Trust and Security in Cyberspace or the Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. Hardening widely used software like Orion (or the core internet protocols) helps everyone. We need to dampen this offensive arms race rather than exacerbate it, and work towards cyber peace. Otherwise, hypocritically criticizing the Russians for doing the same thing we do every day wont help create the safer world in which we all want to live.

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The US has suffered a massive cyberbreach. It's hard to overstate how bad it is - The Guardian

A second COVID vaccine has begun distribution. This ones made by Moderna, and STAT News has an informative side-by-side comparison with the Pfizer vaccine thats been going out for just over a week.

What they do, and dont do: Both vaccines seemed to reduce the risk of severe COVID disease. Its not yet known if either prevents asymptomatic infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Nor is it known if vaccinated people can transmit the virus if they do become infected but dont show symptoms. Read on, here.

The coronavirus is mutating, as viruses do. A new faster-spreading variant has Britain locking down even harder, but scientists say it appears unlikely to change in ways that make the vaccines less effective.

The 7-day average of U.S. COVID deaths keeps setting records. Yesterday it hit 2,639, per the New York Times tracker one death every 33 seconds.

Help is on the way, President-elect Joe Biden said Sunday after lawmakers reportedly reached a deal on roughly $900 billion in coronavirus relief for Americans. The bill "provides an important downpayment on the investment we need in vaccine procurement and distribution," Biden said, but cautioned, "We need to scale up vaccine production and distribution and acquire tens of millions more doses."

Then what? "In our first 100 days, well be asking all Americans to mask up for 100 days," he continued. "Well have a plan to administer 100 million vaccine shots in 100 days and to get most schools open in the first 100 days. These are bold, but doable steps to contain the virus and get back to our lives."

The Biden White House also says it's planning a sort of public relations campaign for vaccines "to educate the American people in the efficacy and safety...so that we can all reap the benefits of their protection." More to that, here.

Trump Officials Deliver Plan to Split Up Cyber Command, NSA // Katie Bo Williams: An end to the dual hat arrangement has been debated for years but the timing raises questions. The plan requires Milley's certification to move ahead.

Space Force Troops Get a Name: Guardians // Marcus Weisgerber: VP Pence revealed the moniker for Trumps oft-teased newest military service branch to stand alongside soldiers, airmen, sailors, and Marines.

Defense One Radio, Ep. 83 // Defense One Staff : Interview with CENTCOMs Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie.

A Day of Deaths 25 Percent Higher Than Springs Worst / The COVID Tracking Project: For the second week in a row, more COVID-19 deaths were reported in the U.S. than at any other time in the pandemic.

How Were Building a 21st-Century Space Force // Gen. John W. Raymond is Chief of Space Operations, U.S. Space Force: Only by staying lean, agile, and tightly focused on our mission can we succeed in protecting the United States.

Pushing Billions in Arms Sales Is Not an Accomplishment // William D. Hartung: It matters to whom the weapons are flowing and how they will be used.

Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief from Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. Send us tips from your community right here. And if youre not already subscribed to The D Brief, you can do that here. On this day in 1945, George Smith Patton Jr., passed away from pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure 13 days after an automobile accident in Germany paralyzed him from the neck down. He was 60 years old.

Trumps deference to Russia continues. Nearly a week after news broke about the large and historic cyber intrusion across multiple federal agencies, President Trump finally spoke up about it in a tweet on Saturday.The Cyber Hack is far greater in the Fake News Media than in actuality," Trump tweeted about the impact and damage, which has already entangled the State, Treasury, Energy, Homeland Security and Commerce Departments as well as the National Institutes of Health.A grave risk to the federal government is how DHSs Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency described it in a statement updated today.[I]t may be China, Trump tweeted Saturday, without even a suggestion of evidence. He went on to speculate again, without evidence that the cyber intrusions across the federal agencies might somehow be related to voting machines. Read the rest of that paranoid and virtually incomprehensible tweet, here.

Will feds selloff of 5G frequencies risk more airplane crashes? Maybe, say officials with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Transportation, who are asking the Federal Communications Commission to halt the ongoing auction. And the Defense Department? Leaders, who are kinda just tuning in to this 5G wrinkle, are meeting today with counterparts at FAA and DOT to figure out the path forward, Defense News reports.

Lockheed Martin is acquiring rocket-maker Aerojet Rocketdyne Holdings for more than $4 billion, Lockheed announced Sunday. The two firms have been working together for some time already on several advanced systems across [LMTs] Aeronautics, Missiles and Fire Control and Space business areas, Lockheed said in its statement. More from Reuters, here.

The UAE and/or Saudi Arabia appear to be behind a cell phone hacking operation that spanned dozens of Middle Eastern journalists working for Qatar-based al-Jazeera, the Washington Post reports. That probable conclusion is from an alarming report by researchers with the Citizen Lab at the University of Torontos Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy.Apparently, victims didnt have to do anything to get hacked; and thats why researchers called the vulnerability a zero-click exploit.One big takeaway: All iOS device owners should immediately update to the latest version of the operating system. More here.

Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny duped an FSB agent into confessing details of the poisoning operation that was supposed to kill him, CNN reports on the heels of their joint investigation into Russias attempts to kill Navalny.

Here are 15 ways the U.S. military says it will try to improve its racial diversity and inclusiveness, via a report commissioned in the wake of protests against police brutality this summer after the death of George Floyd:

The Secretary of the Air Force chaired the Board on Diversity and Inclusion, which also included the Senior Enlisted Advisor to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, and Service members from each branch of the Military Services and the National Guard Bureau. The group reviewed industry best practices, and assessed pertinent data and reports when writing up its 15 recommendations.After reviewing the Board' s 15 recommendations, Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller wrote in a department memo released Friday evening by the Pentagon, I am pleased to see such a methodical evaluation leading to the development of such rigorous actions to address diversity and inclusion. I expect all leaders to take an aggressive approach to embed diversity and inclusion practices into the core of our military culture...We must not accept-and must intentionally and proactively remove any barriers to an inclusive and diverse force and equitable treatment of every Service member.The first phase of post-report actions are expected by March 31, according to Millers reaction plan to each of the 15 recommendations. And that will involve

And the Pentagon must begin working on how to reduce extremist or hate group activity by March 31, with a plan of action and milestones to be spelled out by the end of June. That falls to the Pentagon's Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and its Under Secretary for Intelligence and Security. For more on what lies ahead, see Acting SecDef Millers memo (PDF) in full, here.

And lastly today, Space Forcer troops got a collective name on Friday: guardians. As in soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, and guardians. Reports Defense Ones Marcus Weisgerber: The new name for militarys space professionals, announced on Friday by Vice President Mike Pence, may appear to be a play on the Marvel superhero film Guardians of the Galaxy. But Space Force officials said it was a callback to a 1983 motto.That didnt stop various Hollywood types associated with the movie from chipping in their two cents. Tweeted Clark Gregg, who plays S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson: My pet raccoon just got a draft notice. WTF.The new name was missing from the Chief of Space Operations oped published by The Atlantic on Sunday. Only by staying lean, agile, and tightly focused on our mission can we succeed in protecting the United States, wrote Gen. John W. Raymond. Read that, here.

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Today's D Brief: Vaccines, compared; NSA/CYBERCOM split?; More Trump deference to Russia; Welcome, 'guardians'; And a bit more. - Defense One