Defense Secretary Ashton Carter has said the U.S. Cyber Command has launched a cyber military campaign in an effort to disrupt the Islamic State militant organization’s communications systems and command-and-control platforms, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Damian Paletta and Felicia Schwartz write Carter and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, briefed reporters Monday about the Defense Department’s cyber attacks against the group.

Carter said the U.S.-led cyber attacks launched in Syria aim “to interrupt ISIL’s command and control, to cause them to lose confidence in their networks [and] to overload their networks so that they can’t function.”

Lolita Baldor reports for the Associated Press the defense chief also noted that the cyber attacks against the militant group’s communications systems might drive the organization to adopt older platforms.

“As we disrupt the ISIL communications via cyber or other methods, sometimes we do drive them to other means,” Carter said, according to the report.

“Sometimes, those other means are easier for us to listen to.”

Scientists at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency have started to develop a cloud-based tool that aims to help epidemiologists identify and analyze human and animal disease anomalies and issue warnings on pandemics, DoD News reported Monday.

Cheryl Pellerin writes the Biosurveillance Ecosystem is designed to provide visualized results and analyses on emerging infectious diseases through applications that work to collect and analyze data from various sources.

DTRA scientists Christopher Kiley and John Hannan told DoD News in an interview that the BSVE system is based on an open-source software and uses machine learning algorithms to identify variations in disease signals.

“The BSVE is designed to foster collaboration and data sharing but it uses a security model that provides for individual data sets and applications to be restricted to specific users, if necessary,” Kiley said.

DTRA’s joint science and technology office for chemical and biological defense partnered with biomedical software firm Digital Infuzion to develop a system prototype, Pellerin reports.

The BSVE tool is a joint program of DTRA’s JSTO-CBD office and the Department of Homeland Security’s national biosurveillance integration center.

A team of National Institute of Standards and Technology researchers has developed a nondestructive process for the detection of cracks on multilayer ceramic capacitors that are widely used in spacecraft and implantable medical technology.

NIST said Monday it tested the nonlinear crack-detection method with other researchers from the University of Maryland, NASA‘s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Colorado State University.

The approach, which involves high-frequency acoustic measurements, helped the NIST-led research team identify visible cracks in more than 90 percent of sample ceramic capacitors during a study.

The agency added it believes the technique holds potential to prevent electrical failures in cardiac pacemakers and defibrillators, satellites and space vehicles.

NIST has partnered with a capacitor manufacturer to conduct further studies to quantify crack-detection levels using the agency’s nonlinear acoustic method.

The Air Force Space Command‘s Cyberspace Vulnerability Assessment/Hunter weapon system has reached full operational capability status on Feb. 12.

AFSPC said Friday the status makes CVA/H capable of serving as the primary enclave defense tool for the Air Force Information Network.

CVA/H works to assess vulnerability, detect threats and evaluate compliance through its four primary components: the Mobile Interceptor Platform, the Deployable Interceptor Platform, the Garrison Interceptor Platform and the Information Operations Platform-Fly Away Kit.

Brigadier General Stephen Whiting, AFSPC director of integrated air, space, cyberspace and ISR operations, signed off the FOC status and said CVA/H aims to give the service branch the “ability to fly, fight and win in air, space and cyberspace.”

The cyber threat detection system will be used by Cyber Protection Teams under U.S. Cyber Command.

CVA/H was officially classified as a weapon system by the Air Force Chief of Staff in March 2013 and reached Initial Operational Capability in June 2013.

AFSPC added the cyber defense tool was labeled as a “weapon system” to be considered equally for program-associated funding but it does not function as a weapon by the definition of the Air Force and the Defense Department.