Participants in military cyber-war exercise attacked the system running the game

During the 2006 "Cyber Storm" military online wargame, players had to be disciplined by the referees for attacking the systems that game was running on:

However, the government's files hint at a tantalizing mystery: In the middle of the war game, someone quietly attacked the very computers used to conduct the exercise. Perplexed organizers traced the incident to overzealous players and sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" reminding them not to probe or attack the game computers.

"Any time you get a group of (information technology) experts together, there's always a desire, 'Let's show them what we can do,'" said George Foresman, a former senior Homeland Security official who oversaw Cyber Storm. "Whether its intent was embarrassment or a prank, we had to temper the enthusiasm of the players."

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• [ndollak]

  Wait — why are we fighting each other? The computer’s the REAL enemy here! Let’s team up and overthrow it!

• [Alan]

  My brother was in the US Air Force way back when. They’d have war games, and he’d get berated all the time for actually trying. Someone would sneak up to his post, he’d detain them, then get in trouble for not letting them through to the other guys. One time he single-handedly captured another post but got in trouble because it embarrassed the commanding officer. He kept doing stuff like that, though, because that’s how real war is; you don’t know what your enemy will do, you don’t know when they’ll attack, and they aren’t gonna just let you by. That’s probably the same for these guys; there was a situation and they dealt with it quickly and efficiently.

• [License Farm]

  All skiffy nerds got beat by Everyplace.

  So instead I just offer: up up down down left right left right B A B A select start.

  Good morning, Professor Falken; would you like to play a game?

• [everyplace]

  Definitely a prime example of the Kobayashi Maru if ever I’ve seen one.

• [OM]

  “IDKFA”

• [Dan B.]

  “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room.”

• [Agent 86]

  What, you mean there isn’t a God Mode in real life? Everything I learned from video games is a lie, apparently.

  PS:Sure, it didn’t help the hacker train for real world combat, but the rest of the competitors who suddenly had to face a conflict radically different than they were led to believe should be thankful.

• [noen]

  We are so screwed in a real cyber-war.

• [jackrabbit]

  While I’m sympathetic to Alan’s brother’s frustration, this sort of problem comes up all the time is often misunderstood by observers and sometimes particpants. The thing everyone’s got to understand is that a wargame isn’t a game in the classic sense. It’s not a contest where someone’s going to get a prize for winning. It’s an experiment set up in a particular (often contrived) way to help understand something specific (such as will a new weapon system provide an advantage in a specific circumstance). It sometimes doesn’t take much (like someone unexpectedly hacking a computer) to invalidate the experiment. The fact that someone could hack the computer in real-life isn’t relevant. There are a million things that could happen in real life. If the computer hack derailed the wargame so that the desired situation didn’t happen, the experimenters didn’t learn what they wanted to learn and the whole thing would have been wasted.

• [dr.psilo]

  Damn, Everyplace beat me to it. :-)