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William Warren Whitescarver, who owned a defined contribution and pension plan business and had been a code-breaker during the Cold War, died of cancer Monday at his Ruxton home. He was 81.

Born in Baltimore and raised in Homeland and Roland Park, he was the son of James Field Whitescarver, a World War I aviator and chemical engineer, and Annie Crewe Warren, a Virginia native.

Mr. Whitescarver attended the Gilman School, where he learned to play golf and participated in squash and tennis. He was a 1954 graduate of St. James School in Hagerstown. He then joined the Army and served in the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Jackson, S.C.

Because of his aptitude in mathematics and puzzle solving, Mr. Whitescarver was assigned to the Army Security Agency School at Fort Devens, Mass., where he was trained as a cryptanalyst shortly after the end of the Korean War.

"My father said he had to master several languages, including Chinese," said a daughter, Virginia Whitescarver Pittman of Glyndon. "He said his work was like solving a puzzle. He looked for repeated letters or patterns. For him, there was always a way to take a language apart."

After he left military service, Mr. Whitescarver earned a bachelor's degree at the John Hopkins University. While a student, and for several years after graduation, he worked for the National Security Agency.

"He would go to cocktail parties, but he couldn't discuss anything he was doing," his daughter said. "He said it was tough to get dates because there was nothing to talk about."

In 1956, he married Virginia Conradt "Connie" Boyce, who was later board manager of the Woman's Industrial Exchange. The couple owned hunting and steeplechase horses.

Mr. Whitescarver left the NSA and joined the old Mercantile-Safe Deposit and Trust Co., where he worked in employee benefit plans.

"My father had a mind for mathematics," his daughter said.

In 1969, he left the bank and became a consultant to Herget and Co. in Charles Center. He later worked in the Baltimore-Washington office of Meidinger and Associates, another actuarial firm, also located in downtown Baltimore. In order to increase his knowledge of the field, he earned a master's degree in tax law at the University of Baltimore.

In 1985, Mr. Whitescarver co-founded Benefits Designers of Maryland. He had a Redwood Street office.

He worked with local employers to create retirement savings plans and custom-tailored investments for their workers. Among his clients was the Maryland Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association. As part of his duties, he visited the state's race courses and counseled workers on retirement plans.

"He was an early leader in the field of defined contribution and pension plans," said another daughter, Annie Whitescarver Brown of Ruxton, a T. Rowe Price vice president. She said she entered the field of finance because of her father.

"He pushed me forward in my knowledge of this industry. He was an articulate man and good writer who could explain a complicated financial concept."

He sold his business in 2007, and then joined Chapin, Davis; he became its vice president of investments and a member of its board. He worked in an office in the Village of Cross Keys. His wife also worked there, and their offices faced each other.

Mr. Whitescarver taught law at the University of Baltimore. He was chair of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland's Compensation Review Committee.

Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. named him to the board of the Maryland Supplemental Retirement Plans, and he was a past chair of its investment committee.

Mr. Whitescarver enjoyed tenpin bowling, tennis and golf. He earned the nickname "Skipper" after one of his shots skipped across a pond at the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club course.

In 1999, with his longtime partner, Thomas Swindell, he won the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club's Invitational Tournament. He also rated golf courses for Golf Week magazine, traveling to Australia, Ireland, South Africa and throughout the U.S.

"My father started as a caddie at the old Baltimore Country Club course in Roland Park in the 1940s. He would tell stories about how Falls Road cut the course in half," said another daughter, Mary Warren Whitescarver Scholtes of Phoenix in Baltimore County. "He was also a graceful dancer and could sweep a novice partner across any dance floor."

His daughters said their father was a humorist and storyteller. They said he had a contagious laugh accented by his twinkling blue eyes.

A life celebration will be held from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday at the Green Spring Valley Hunt Club.

In addition to his three daughters, survivors include a sister, Frances Cook of Denver, and six grandchildren. His wife of 49 years died in 2015.

jacques.kelly@baltsun.com

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William W. Whitescarver, Army and NSA code-breaker and retirement investment planner, dies - Baltimore Sun

Senators on the Armed Services Committee will be briefed by a top intelligence official on cyber threats Tuesday morning.

The hearing, which will beclosedto the public, will feature testimony from Adm. Michael Rogers, who holds the dual-leadership role at U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency (NSA).

The closed-door briefing will give lawmakers an opportunity to press Rogers on the intelligence communitys recent findings about Russias cyber attacks aimed at the U.S. presidential election.

The committee last received testimony from Rogers and other intelligence officials on foreign cyber threats to the United States in January, ahead of the intelligence communitys release of a report on Russias meddling in the U.S. presidential election.

The CIA, FBI and NSA concluded in theinvestigationthat Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a cyber and disinformation campaign to undermine the U.S. democratic process, harm Hillary Clintons electability and aid now-President Donald TrumpDonald TrumpWH list of terror attacks misspells San Bernardino Trump: Mexico needs help on drug cartels WH lists terror attacks it claims media ignored MORE.

The Pentagon and other government agencies have been challenged to secure computer systems and infrastructure as cyber threats from nation states and other hostile actors have increased.

Trump waspoisedto sign an executive action overhauling cybersecurity across the government last week, though it was ultimately postponed.

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Head of NSA to brief senators on cyber threats - The Hill

On Monday, The Washington Post reported one of the most stunning breaches of security ever. A former NSA contractor, the paper said, stole more than 50 terabytes of highly sensitive data. According to one source, that includes more than 75 percent of the hacking tools belonging to the Tailored Access Operations. TAO is an elite hacking unit that develops and deploys some of the world's most sophisticated software exploits.

Investigators have floated several theories. One holds that Martin directly provided the tools to the person or group responsible for the leak. An alternate theory is that the leakers obtained the software by hacking Martin. As reported in October, Martin was charged with felony theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified material. Monday's Washington Post article says that prosecutors will likely file charges of "violating the Espionage Act by 'willfully' retaining information that relates to the national defense, including classified data such as NSA hacking tools and operational plans against 'a known enemy' of the United States."

An unnamed US official told the paper that Martin allegedly hoarded more than 75 percent of the TAO's library of hacking tools. It's hard to envision a scenario under which a theft of that much classified material by a single individual would be possible.

Listing image by National Security Agency

Link:
Former NSA contractor may have stolen 75% of TAO's elite hacking tools - Ars Technica

Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the National Security Agency, has announced he will retire this spring, the agency confirmed to CyberScoop Friday.

Ledgett, 59, has been deputy director the agencys top civilian since January 2014, when he succeeded Chris Inglis. Prior to that, according to his official biography,He led the NSA Media Leaks Task Force responsible for integrating and overseeing the totality of NSAs efforts surrounding the Ed Snowden megaleaks.

Ledgett joined the NSAin 1988 and and rose to be, during 2012-13, director of the agencysThreat Operations Center, the famed NTOC. Before that, he served a a stint 2010-12 in various posts in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, including being the the first national intelligence manager for cyber.

He is a recipient of the National Intelligence Superior Service Medal and was for a time an instructor andand course developer at the National Cryptologic School.

It has been anticipated that he would retire in 2017 and he decided the time is right this spring after nearly 40 years of service to the nation, the agency said in an emailed statement.

Last year, Ledgett presented a gloomy picture of the connected future, warning about the dangers of the Internet of Things. Hetoldthe U.S. Chamber of Commerces 5th Annual Cybersecurity Summit that theconnection to our networks of hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, ofinternet-connecteddevices that come from multiple vendors and havediffering software and hardware upgrade paths without a coherent security plan means that there are vulnerabilities[created]in those networks.

Continued here:
NSA's No. 2, its top civilian, will retire shortly - FedScoop

After a never-before-seen group announced it was in possession of a trove of malware developed by the elite hacking arm of the National Security Agency early this week, professional security researchers began working to try and determine whether the code the group released was truly developed by the NSA.

Working off of hints they found in the code, which was released by a group calling itself the Shadow Broker, researchers guessed it was authenticbut new documentation straight from the source appears to confirm the codes provenance.

According to NSA documents obtained by Edward Snowden and reviewed by The Intercept, several elements in the released code line up with details in the agencys own manuals and materials.

One manual, for example, instructs agents to use a specific 16-character string, ace02468bdf13579, to track a certain strain of government-developed malware as it makes its way through networks. That string shows up character-for-character in one of the leaked hacking tools, SECONDDATE.

The tool allows the NSA to execute man-in-the-middle attacks, which intercept traffic on a network as its traveling from its origin to its destination. The agency used it to redirect users who think theyre browsing safe websites to NSA-run servers that infect their computers with malwareand then back to their destination before they know what happened. In a slide deck, the NSA used cnn.com as an example of the sort of site it could exploit to deliver its malicious code.

The documents released by The Intercept reveal that SECONDDATE has been used to spy on systems in Pakistan and in Lebanon, where it gained access to data belonging to Hezbollah.

Its still not clear how the tools leaked from the NSA. Snowden speculated on Twitter that the tools could have been found on a server it used to infect a target, but former NSA staffers interviewed by Motherboard said the leak could be the work of a rogue insider, claiming that some of the files in the leak would never had made it to an outside server.

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Confirmed: The NSA Got Hacked - The Atlantic