[iwar] U.S. attack: Companies warned about possible cyberattacks

From: VERNON THOMAS STAGG (vstagg@deakin.edu.au)
Date: 2001-09-14 07:18:50

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From: VERNON THOMAS STAGG <vstagg@deakin.edu.au>
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Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 00:18:50 +1000 (EST)
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Subject: [iwar] U.S. attack: Companies warned about possible cyberattacks
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Dont think this has been posted here. Apart from the expected hacker attacks and web 
site attacks/defacements it will be interesting to see if there is any major sort of 
cyberattack carried out - from either US or terrorists (although from what they have 
done so far it seems they have stuck to the traditional form of terrorist attack). 
Considering the amount of time spent coordinating/planning these attacks it would be 
interesting -and speculative - to consider if they had applied their efforts to a 
more modern/high tech attack.

http://www.infoworld.com/articles/hn/xml/01/09/12/010912hncyber.xml

U.S. attack: Companies warned about possible cyberattacks 
By Dan Verton And And Bob Brewin, Computerworld 
WASHINGTON -- GOVERNMENT and private-sector security experts fear that Tuesday's 
attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are only the beginning of a 
wave of assaults that could include cyberterrorism.

Officials at the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC), located at 
FBI headquarters here, were gathering for an emergency meeting to collect and 
analyze all available cyberintelligence information, said Navy Rear Adm. James 
Plehal, the deputy director of the NIPC. Details of the meeting aren't yet 
available. 

Meanwhile, Marv Langston, former deputy CIO at the Defense Department, viewed 
Tuesday's terrorist attacks as an act of war and warned that they could be followed 
by a series of cyberattacks. Langston said the United States needs to prepare itself 
for what he described as an "electronic Pearl Harbor." 

Air Force Lt. Gen. Retired Al Edmonds, now head of the Electronic Data Systems 
federal division, said "I would suspect a cyberattack could be next, and that would 
be absolutely paralyzing." 

In the 1990s, the Pentagon produced a series of studies that showed that a cyber 
attack on computer and communication systems could cripple the United States as 
severely as a physical attack. Such an attack could shut down water systems, power 
plants, railroads, airports, and oil and gas pipelines, all of which run on computer 
and communications systems. Each system is usually controlled by a central, 
vulnerable location. 

But Jeff Moss, president and CEO of Black Hat Briefings, a security consulting firm 
in Seattle, said he hasn't discovered a cyber component to Tuesday's attacks. 

"People are watching their logs, but from what I can tell nobody has seen anything 
yet," said Moss, who is the founder of the annual Def Con hacker conference. 

"Today will be security review day for a lot of places," Moss said. 

Meanwhile, Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems (ISS), which operates the IT 
sector's Information Sharing and Analysis Center (ISAC), has placed its operations 
center on what it calls AlertCon 3 (the highest is AlertCon 4), "in order to focus 
IT security efforts on the potential for (and defense against) an Internet component 
to these attacks." The ISAC works in cooperation with the FBI and the NIPC in 
sharing information about cyberthreats. 

"Our monitored networks do not show any unusual activity at this time, but our 
[Security Operations Centers] are at a heightened state of alert as we watch for any 
indications that e-commerce is also being targeted," an ISS spokesman said. The 
financial district around Wall Street in lower Manhattan was closed down. 

"This is a time to partner all security assets on what is most important to your 
enterprise," the ISS threat assessment states. "While physical security concerns are 
paramount, it is essential to keep some eyes on the networks focused on malicious 
activity. We can expect a significant increase in disaster-recovery activity -- 
plans being activated, dusted off, etc. No doubt the [disaster-recovery] industry 
will be sorely stressed at this point, and it would behoove staffs to consider 
security as a move to alternate sites is contemplated or enacted." 

The major question being asked by some experts is how such a large-scale, 
coordinated attack could have been accomplished without security officials being 
tipped off through cyber or communications intelligence. Most experts acknowledge, 
however, that there are only a handful of terrorist organizations in the world 
capable of conducting such an operation in secret. And they likely used nontechnical 
means of communications that would have allowed them to escape U.S. intelligence IT 
surveillance operations. 

John Garber, vice president of Cryptec Secure Communications in Chantilly, Va., and 
a former National Security Agency official, said the capabilities of the U.S. 
intelligence community are "fairly well known" by the terrorist organizations that 
are suspects in this series of attacks. 

"They do an awful lot of communications through messengers and nondigital methods," 
Garber said. "It's not like them to be walking around talking on telephones. This 
doesn't strike me as a signals intelligence failure as much as a failure of national 
[agency] coordination," he said. 

"This is a large and extremely well-coordinated attack. In spite of our best efforts 
to coordinate intelligence collection on terrorists, this is a massive failure of 
national cooperation," said Garber, who was in downtown Washington when the Pentagon 
was attacked. "I can't believe there were no indications." 

Edmonds, who ran the Defense Information Systems agency, which operates the 
Pentagon's global networks and has a key role in the Defense Department's 
cberdefense, said that anyone running an enterprise network today needs to be 
extremely vigilant against cyberattacks. 

Edmonds said cyber and physical security concerns have increased such an extent that 
a number of federal agencies located in Washington have already started to activate 
plans to move to alternative locations.

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