ISRO chief Madhavan Nair new head of International Academy of Astronautics

04 Sep 2009: LatestNewsOnline report claims that he is the first non-American in this position.

Pakistan starts drone production in collaboration with Italian firm Selex Galileo

21 Aug 2009 Geo TV: The Pakistan Aeronautical Complex Kamra has commenced producing the pilotless planes Falco UAV in collaboration with Selex Galileo of Italy. Aeronautical Complex chief Air Marshal Farhat Hussain said pilotless Falco UAV highly important for the country’s defence, adding the production of the planes will greatly add to the professional capabilities of PAF. Full news.

Eurocopter MoU with Mistral for embedded systems

14 Jun 2009 EFY Times: Mistral Solutions, specialising in real-time embedded solutions, and Eurocopter have signed an MoU to jointly collaborate and execute activities in the aerospace and defence domains. According to the agreement, Mistral will be a technology partner to Eurocopter and will offer engineering services covering hardware design, firmware/embedded software development, systems integration, testing and qualification. Full news

Here is a link to Mistral.

"Our systems cannot be tampered with" Army

In response to the recent Canadian expose on Chinese Cyber attacks...

31 Mar 2009 IndianExpress: "We have put in place a very secure network and I can confidently say that it cannot be tampered with," Army's Signal Officer-in-Chief Lieutenant General P Mohapatra told reporters in New Delhi. "Its exclusive, there are various cryptographic controls that we have put in place and there are training activities to ensure that no loss of information takes place." Full news

8ak note: I am sure he doesnt believe this himself either. No system is fool-proof and it would be counter-productive to believe it is.

Cyber Bomb Thrown at U.S. Capitol Hill - China suspected

26 Mar 2009 DefenceTech: Chinese hackers attacked the office computers of Senator Bill Nelson recently sparking a push at recent hearings for more to be done about cyber intrusions, our friend Josh Rogin reports at Congressional Quarterly. In three separate attacks, two in March and one in February, cyberhackers targeted the work stations of Nelson’s foreign policy aide, his deputy legislative director, and “a former Nelson NASA adviser,” Nelson’s office said in a statement. Full news

8ak note: The report went on to say that even though the IP addresses were traced to China, they could have been masked, so they could just as easily have come from New York or Zimbawe. This however did not prevent the comments that followed from abusing the Chinese and telling the government to prioritise funding for cyber warfare.

29 Mar update NYT: Chinese Hackers break in to computers of 103 countries

Building a New Cyber Warfare Infrastructure

24 Mar 2009 DefenseTalk: Numerous technologies must come together to deliver the offensive/defensive as well as the intelligence/counter-intelligence capabilities. Also required are significant advances in three specific areas of technology. A high level definition of the three core technologies required to create a highly effective cyber warfare infrastructure is provided below:

1. Intelligence Fusion and Collaboration (IFC) Technology.
2. Adaptive Cyber Countermeasure (AC2M) Technology 
3. Cyber Surveillance and Target Acquisition (CSTA) Technology.

Full news