U.S. Intel Software Crashes During Korea Exercise

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=7757455

By BEN IANNOTTA
Defense News
22 Sep 2011

Intelligence software that the U.S. would rely on in a war with North 
Korea froze up repeatedly during a joint military exercise in South 
Korea in August, hampering the ability of U.S. and South Korean 
commanders to watch the movements of simulated enemy forces, a senior 
intelligence official said.

The Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) software is designed 
to link intelligence analysts to processed communications intercepts, 
imagery and radar collections stored in massive databases. When American 
intelligence analysts tried to use the software to track simulated North 
Korean troop movements, the screens on their DCGS-A workstations 
sometimes went black, forcing them to reboot the software, the senior 
intelligence official said.

Analysts could not always feed the latest enemy positions into the 
Command Post of the Future, the large computer displays that U.S. 
commanders would rely on to view troop positions and orchestrate 
defenses with their South Korean counterparts.

"What happened is the volume of information essentially crashed the 
software," the senior intelligence official said. "We learned to 
manually do [data retrieval] in chunks of information so DCGS would not 
crash."

[...]


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