A water utility in Illinois was recently hacked in a cyber attack traced back to Russia. The motives aren’t clear, but the act demonstrates how vulnerable U.S. SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) networks are, and the potential risks posed to the critical infrastructure of the United States. Dr. John James and Dr. Frank Mabry of the West Point Network Science Center helped organize the first IEEE International Workshop on Critical Infrastructure Protection and participated in a two-year study sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security on cyber issues with SCADA.
The Bionic foot is a unique outcome from an intense set of cadet projects in
Civil and Mechanical Engineering. While the entire project is incredible, the individual embedded technologies are breakthroughs by themselves. Most important, advanced prosthetics for
Wounded Warriors is an area of research in which commercial industry has not shown a great deal of interest. If the cadets had not taken on this project, it would not have been accomplished!
In a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, President Obama announced that he approved the recommendations generated by the PSD-10 review and listed five points of action for the Department of Defense, one of which was the Mass Atrocities Workshop organized by Professor David Frey, Director of USMA’s Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The full text of the President’s statement can be found
here Mention of the USMA-USHMM workshop is roughly five paragraphs from the end.
LTC William Pearman (C&LS and PRC) and Dr. J. Kenneth Wickiser (C&LS) are collaborating with
Dr. Roger Hanlon, on a project involving the use of Hyperspectral Imagery (HSI) analysis to discover optical clues to creating effective camouflage. Pictured are (L-to-R) Dr. Hanlon, LTC Pearman, Dr. Wickiser, and Justine Allen (graduate student at the MBL and Brown University) and an example of refined hyperspectral imagery data on a flounder.
According to an article in Wired's
Danger Room, the Army absolutely loves its new Android, iOS and Windows smartphones and tablets. However, a spot check of mobile devices used by the Army at its West Point Military Academy and in its Corps of Engineers shows inconsistent and outright poor data security. At West Point, 15 out of 48 inspected mobile devices didn’t even have passwords set up. The rest of the article is
here.