Coast Guard to stand up first cyber ‘red team’ as it creates Cyber Operational Assessments Branch

The Coast Guard is transforming its cyber “blue team” enterprise into a more comprehensive Cyber Operational Assessments Branch, and is standing up its first red team as part of this restructuring. The red team, which the Coast Guard will stand up later this summer, will serve as a cyber adversary emulation and penetration testing organization for its cybersecurity operations. Lt. Kenneth Miltenberger, the cyber blue team branch chief, said the blue team will continue to provide endpoint scanning, cooperative vulnerability assessments and security consulting for its acquisition operations. Miltenberger said the Cyber Operational Assessments Branch, as part of its purview, will look at the challenges and opportunities of 5G infrastructure, a topic that’s gaining momentum in the Defense Department. “If I tried to do my AR/VR training by pushing everything back to a data center from Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State back to a data center in the Pentagon, I’m stuck with a number of challenges just in terms of bandwidth, in terms of latency.