Safes Security Australia

Harbor security keeping Sasebo's ships safe

SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan — The three-man harbor security team set out from the sleepy base in western Japan on Friday afternoon under overcast skies to begin their patrol around two of the 7th Fleet’s valued assets — the USS Essex and USS Germantown.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Ryan Blazer, Petty Officer 3rd Class Richard Wood, and Seaman Apprentice Corrine Roberts had already been on the water earlier that day to check out a potential threat floating in the basin waters. As they picked up steam and headed out toward the harbor’s outlying areas, their heads were on a constant swivel, on the lookout for anything suspicious. From items floating in the water to every passing boat, everything was thoroughly scrutinized.

On this patrol, no potential threats materialized, but the sailors said that with such important assets docked nearby, they were always ready to fight. The 2000 bombing of the USS Cole ushered in an era of vigilance that can still be found today among harbor security teams. And the Sasebo sailors — masters-at-arms by trade — are some of the best: The team was rated by the Navy as one of the top harbor security operations during its last inspection in 2010.

The sailors’ attention to detail was on display this week, base leaders say, when the Essex prepares to depart for the Talisman Sabre exercise off the coast of Australia.

“On the water, a threat can come from anywhere — the air, underwater, the surface. The sailors have to be prepared for it,” said Chief Petty Officer Dale Tice, commander of the harbor security team. “This job is one of the most dynamic I’ve seen. There is no down time for harbor security.”

The last time an aircraft carrier came to Sasebo , the team established a security zone around the ship, according to Tice. In five days, the sailors boarded and swept 263 vessels, including tugboats, pilot boats, garbage and water barges, and even cranes.

Sasebo’s team has six boats and 34 members that work around the clock. In addition to protecting the ships and outlying areas, they perform myriad other tasks, from aiding in criminal investigations at sea to transporting personnel to pulling people trapped in vehicles out of the water, Tice said.

Harbor security members must be prepared at all times to respond to threats with force if necessary and to block threats from reaching the ships, even if it means offering up their own vessel and themselves, Tice said. The sailors are armed with .9 mm pistols, either an M4 or M16, and an M240B crew-served weapon.

No CSO? Hire one now, advises security expert - staffing, security ...

Enterprises without a chief security officer or a beefed up security department will be left wide open as hackers use new exploits to strike, warns a security industry expert.

M86 Security vice-president, Jeremy Hulse, told CSO Australia that the reason gaming companies, such as Sega, from which hackers stole personal data of 1.29 million customers over the weekend, had been hit was because of new exploits and malware on legitimate websites that security staff may not be aware of.

"Upwards of 80 to 90 per cent of good websites can host malware and that can be from a period of 20 minutes to 24 hours, but they [hackers] generally don't leave it up for a long period of time," Hulse said.

"All it takes is for someone from Sega or another company to access the website and download the exploit to their internal network."

"For Sony not to have a chief security officer [before the attacks occurred] is quite a startling revelation," Hulse said. He added that M86 had recently come across a large amount of malware that was not caught by signature databases. "From our own studies with customers, the traditional signature based security is not working and they have some exploit that may not have been discovered [by security staff] yet."

Read more about security in CIO’s 2011 Global State of Information Security Survey .

This meant the chief security officer had to be prepared to deal with unknown threats and invest in new security technologies. "People think they're safe but the hackers are saying, 'No, you're not safe' and they are proving it," said Hulse. "Every time someone in security closes a door the hackers are going to be looking for another."

He added that Cloud service providers also needed to "step up" and inform customers what security measures they could offer before data was hosted in a public or private Cloud.

"The message to Cloud providers is that there needs to be an extra level of diligence. You can't apply traditional security to Cloud services, it's a different game." He advised enterprises considering hosting data in the Cloud to quiz their provider about data encryption and find out if the data would be hosted onshore or offshore.

Got a security tip-off? Contact Hamish Barwick at hamish_barwick at idg.com.