kinda' puts our little browser and modem questions in perspective....
Internet May Threaten National Security
Wars of the future may be fought with viruses and
hack attacks, not with guns and bombs, studies say.
Dan Verton, Computerworld online
Thursday, January 04, 2001
During the next 15 years, the U.S. will face a new breed of
Internet-enabled terrorists, criminals, and nation/state adversaries
that will launch attacks not with planes and tanks, but with
computer viruses and logic bombs, according to two reports
released last month.
Although the 68-page report by the CIA's National Intelligence
Council mentioned critical electronic infrastructure protection and
information warfare only briefly, it warned Americans that
adversaries around the world are hard at work developing tools to
bring down the U.S.'s private sector infrastructure.
Many countries already have programs to develop such technologies
and "could develop such capabilities over the next decade and
beyond," according to the NIC study.
A report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and
International Studies went even further, warning of a future
cyberarms race and the rise of terrorist groups supported by
"computer-literate youngsters" bent on disrupting the Internet.
"The U.S., Russia, China, France, and Israel are developing
cyberarsenals and the means to wage all-out cyberwarfare," the
CSIS study says.
China is of particular concern, say experts, because it's devising
strategies for unrestricted electronic warfare. Officials say critical
infrastructures in the U.S. could be targeted in the future as revenge
for incidents like the 1999 accidental bombing of the Chinese
embassy in Serbia.
"They suggest having every person in China send one e-mail to [an
address] of interest in the U.S. or use hacker tools easily available
on the Internet to support a mass [denial-of-service] attack," says
John Shissler, a former military intelligence officer.
The Always-On Internet
Online extortion and falsification of shipping manifests by criminals,
and attempts by countries to use hacking techniques to evade trade
sanctions are a rising concern, says Jeffrey Hunker, senior director
for critical infrastructure protection at the White House.
Hunker says officials are also becoming increasingly concerned with
the proliferation of "always-on" Internet appliances, such as
modems and network printers. Hackers are finding ways to
penetrate these devices and possibly use them as launching pads
for more devastating distributed denial-of-service attacks, he says.
Last year a hacker cracked into a printer at the Navy's Space and
Naval Warfare Center and rerouted a potentially sensitive document
to a server in Russia.
Stephen Northcut, director of the Global Incident Analysis Center at
the SANS Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, says that in one day
recently, his cable modem-equipped laptop received 54 probes, 2 of
which penetrated his personal firewall. "Our systems come to us
hackable," says Northcut. "It's a
feature."
pcworld.com
Story copyright 2000 Computerworld Inc. All rights reserved. |
