DARPA and its cyber-range

DARPA is building a “cyber range” to help train military and government hackers in case of cyber-warfare against the USA. This is a great idea but its being done in the wrong way. Allow me to point out the flaws I find in this system. The main issue I have is they are going to be using virtual hackers. Computer programmed to mimic human hackers. Bad idea. Machines at this point in time and maybe never will be able to mimic a human. Let alone a human hacker.
1. Despite the stereotype hackers are social people. Visit any 2600 meeting, hacker space or on-line forum and you will see hackers share information, brag and at times teach each other. Computers do not do this.
2. Computers no matter how advance or how great the AI program is are still machines that have a set of rules to follow in the form of a program. Humans do not.
3. Human beings can have blind luck. Even a script kiddie gets some lucky “hack” done once in a while.
4. Hackers in general are information junkies staying up to date on the latest bugs, fixes and exploits. For a computer to stay up to date on all this would require an operator and it still would fail at the speed in which the hacker community does it in.
5.Hackers have egos. Something we like to call geek machismo. Being the first to find an use an exploit in a PHP script gains points. Computers having no emotion have no ego the are just doing what the are told to do.

This is in no way a complete list. And if you haven’t figured it out by now I truly believe crowd sourcing this virtual Internet to at least the American hacker community is the best course of action. Having served in the military myself training versus OPFOR (our guys pretending to be enemies) was a much better learning experience than trying to out smart a machine. Let us at it DARPA your guys will be ready for anything after training against the hacker community.