News

CCRI – Make the mission happen

  • Published
  • By Senior Airman Rachel Hammes
  • 55th Wing Public Affairs

For some, the Super Bowl is the culmination of a year’s worth of avid attention. They don’t wash their team jerseys in order to avoid jinxing the quarterback, they don’t schedule anything on game day. Talk around the watercooler revolves around which team has the best chance of making it. Months of training and effort culminate in one day’s work.

The 55th Communications Group at Offutt Air Force Base, Neb., has a similar day looming ahead – the upcoming Cyber Command Readiness Inspection, which will run from May 23-27.

“CCRIs are very hard – in the 55th CS world, this is our Super Bowl,” said U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Christopher Carpenter, section chief of the Wing Cyber Security Office. “Cyber security is not just the realm of cyber security professionals who operate on the network. My office is exceptional at what they do, but when you have a network as large as we have and you have a total of five people in the office – we rely on everyone to make sure they’re using safe computing practices. It’s about common sense stuff.”

While this inspection does focus on servers primarily under the 55th CS’s control, everyday user errors can negatively impact Offutt’s final score greatly.

“It will be a team between four and six people, and they’ll divide up and inspect the wing,” said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Sarah Cleveland, commander of the 55th CS. “They’ll be checking every single building, visiting people’s individual offices. If they see an office door open, they’ll just walk in.”

Many points of failure could lie in areas that are easy to forget.

“They’ll make sure people are using cover sheets, removing their common access cards – all things people know to do,” Cleveland said. “Sometimes, if you’re busy, these things can fall by the wayside. It’s important to remind yourself to slow down and do things in a manner that’s correct, and in a way that’s the same every time.”

Leaving a CAC logged in while away from the computer is a Category I failure for the inspection – the most severe write-up any individual can get.

“If you don’t have your CAC within arm’s reach of you, you don’t have positive control of it,” said U.S. Air Force Maj. Nicholas Brownheim, director of operations at the 55th CS.

Other things members of Team Offutt should consider are forms of media, like CDs, phones or external hard drives.

“Make sure all media is marked with their proper classifications,” said U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Mikki Fehnel, the section chief of the client service center with the 55th CS. “The inspectors will go around looking at unmarked CDs on your desk, and ask you, ‘How do you know there isn’t anything classified on this?’”

In preparation of the inspection, the members of the Wing Cyber Security office are doing inspections of their own – conducting walkthroughs and reporting what they find.

“If we notice a CAC unattended, your name will be written down,” Carpenter said. “I will go in and lock your account until I receive a copy of your Department of Defense Information Awareness training, and until I get something from your flight commander saying you’ve learned your lesson. However, we will confiscate Secret Internet Protocol Router Network tokens if we see them unattended.”

The goal shouldn’t be simply to pass the inspection, but to work to protect the information that allows the mission to happen, Carpenter said.

“Our mission is intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance,” he said. “When they download the data off that jet, that information goes through SIPR net. I want to protect that. Those are our nation’s secrets. The mission moves on our networks, and that’s why the CCRI is so important. It’s not a situation where they smack your hand and write you up – no, they can disconnect networks. You’d better protect our networks, because I only have five people. We’re doing the best we can, but in the end there are 9,000 users.”