Operation Eligible Receiver was a test conducted by our government utilizing what is called the Red Team, which are basically hackers that are on our side trying to gain entry into our computer network via publicly available tools such as metasploit. It was conducted in 1997, and was the first of its kind (Global Security, 2014).
John Hamre, which was the deputy secretary of defense from 1997-1999 said that one of the biggest issues that was shown in operation eligible receiver is the fact that for the first three days, nobody thought that the computers were even under attack even given the pop ups that were showing outside people accessing the computers people were using (Hamre, 2003). I would agree in this aspect in that if users don’t report malicious activity that is being seen at their level, cyber network defenders can’t be expected to just know what is happening at a client level if it isn’t happening to them or being reported.
From the information gathered in the interview with Mr. Hamre, it seems that it was relatively easy for the Red Team to gain entry to the physical infrastructure of the computers they were attacking, and also entry into the network itself. The Red Team was able to send emails from outside sources, using credentials of people from inside the network, and create denial of service attacks.
The most common targets of the Red Team were intelligence agencies, the national command authority, and military commands. Mainly it was an assessment of our Department of Defense and their ability to securely connect to outside sources, or even their ability for command and control within different units.
The national defense structure has come a long way since then. Technology has been put in place to prevent such attacks, and assessments such as what the Red Team did in Operation Eligible Receiver have almost become commonplace, so much so there is an entire military occupation specialty designed around doing things such as this (0689); which conveniently enough is what my military occupation specialty is.
References
Global Security. (2014). Eligible Receiver. Retrieved June 29, 2014, from globalsecurity.org: http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/eligible-receiver.htm
Hamre, J. (2003, April 24). Frontline.