At the Air & Space conference held on September 14-16, 2015 at National Harbor, Maryland (near Washington), Major General Burke Wilson unveiled a new US Air Force project, a modified Cyber EC-130H aircraft that will perform hacking on enemy installations from the air.
Military networks around the world, regardless of country, are usually closed systems, meaning they do not have an Internet connection, mainly to protect sensitive data from being hacked by external factors, such as hackers or the cyber-army of an opposing country.
This means that the only way for someone to breach them is to try to penetrate the networks using infected USB drives, spies moving around the buildings, or attacking the network's local WiFi capabilities from somewhere close to their area.
The military news website Breaking Defense reports that the US Air Force has modified an EC-130H Compass Call to be able to carry out cyber attacks against ground-based enemy military networks. The EC-130H is often used by the US Air Force to jam enemy transmissions in war zones.
This means that if the plane successfully passes the tests, the US Air Force will be able to conduct combat activity against a country with cyber-viruses, while also wreaking havoc with its bombs.
The integration of these types of cyber-attack tools into the US military's arsenal is not such a far-fetched scenario, as General Wilson confirms their increased use in the latest military exercises codenamed Red Flag.
