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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (18799)	2/13/2002 8:50:54 PM
From: Hawkmoon	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bush Adviser Warns Cyberterrorists washingtonpost.com And for more information on the premise behind these comments by Richard Clarke, we have this more specific account: Today's focus: Ripping yarns By M.E. Kabay Riptech recently released its "Internet Security Threat Report" summarizing "Attack Trends for Q3 and Q4 2001." The primary authors of this report, CTO Tim Belcher and Founder and Executive Vice President Elad Yoran correctly note in their introduction to the study that many previously published reports on Internet attacks suffer from methodological flaws. Surveys, for example, inevitably suffer from self-selection bias; automated analysis of unedited firewall and intrusion- detection system (IDS) log files can distort or mask trends by swamping real attack data with spurious false alarms. Riptech used a sample of 300 clients from its security monitoring service clientele. It analyzed 5.5 billion firewall log records and IDS alerts and identified 128,678 attacks over the latter half of 2001. During that period, they found that 63% of the attack activity was caused by Code Red and Nimda worms; these data were excluded from further analyses to prevent other interesting trends from being swamped. Even during the six-month study period, the researchers found a significant increase in the average number of attacks per company: 79% overall between July and December 2001. Many of the attacks (around 40%) seemed to be deliberately targeted at specific organizations. Most (70%) of the attacks came from 10 countries (in descending order of frequency: the U.S., South Korea, China, Germany, France, Canada, Taiwan, Italy, Great Britain and Japan) and almost half came from the first three. Using published estimates of the numbers of Internet users in the countries of origin coupled with population figures, the Riptech team also estimated the per-user incidence rate of attack. In descending order, topping the list were: Israel, Hong Kong, Thailand, South Korea, France, Turkey, Malaysia, Poland, Taiwan and Denmark. The authors write, "Overall, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) vulnerabilities... were the target of the majority of the attacks." Interestingly, the most frequent targets of "severe" attacks ("categorized as either emergency or critical") were on power and energy companies (an average of 12.5 per company over the study period). Among the attacks originating in the Middle East, the average of all types of attack per target company was 66.5 (over six months) for power and energy firms. In contrast, among attacks originating in Asia, financial services companies suffered an average of 339 attacks each over the last half of 2001. This summary provides a taste of the interesting material found, analyzed, summarized and graphed in this stimulating report. To download your free PDF version of the full report, fill out the form at: riptech.com ********************* Bottom line, imo.. the Chinese want money, making that motive most likely to be financial. But Arab hackers want to penetrate critical infrastructure control systems in order to sabotage them and bring down the grid. This has been an ongoing concern for InfoSec analysts, the vulnerability of the electrical grid to penetration attacks. The NSA ran an exercise back in 1999 to see how difficult is would be penetrate major utility company IT systems.. Their success was apparently quite disturbing. Btw, Riptech probably has developed one of the best managed security processes available today (I've toured their operations center, and it's pretty "space-age").. They essentially analyze the IDS and Firewall logs from all of their clients using their proprietary software, in order to segregate likely false positives and negative penetration signatures (port scannings, DDOS.. etc), from actual penetration attempts. And the CEO of the company has extensive connections with DISA . Hawk

To: JohnM who wrote (18799)	2/14/2002 12:03:54 AM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

What put Bush Sr. on the side of the angels on the Kuwait issue was national boundaries. Do they stand for something, or not? Or is it OK to steal another country's territory, or steal the whole country? Interesting thought, Frank. What leads you to believe this? My own answer was James Baker's, "jobs, jobs, jobs". Meaning the critical character of oil for the American economy. Not to mention his Houston buddies. Kuwait and Bush Sr: It doesn't matter what Bush's motivation was because as I said he was on side of the angels. History shows aggression rewarded usually leads to further aggression, especially when the aggressing country is run by a tyrant or a totalitarian ideology. Do you think Hussein was going to be satisfied only with Kuwait? I don't think the US made war to feather the nests of Bush's Texas friends or keep up employment. Democracies go to war for more serious reasons. There is usually great debate before they do, if they haven't been attacked. There has to be a principle. The point of a country is boundaries. Kuwait is not much of a democracy but it's not a tyranny like Iraq. War to steal territory on the part of significant size countries takes on new meaning in an era of weapons of mass destruction. This is especially so if there is doubt about mental/emotional makeup of leader. Ideological war, to expand the true religion, the glory of the leader, the destiny of the fatherland, takes on new meaning in an era of weapons of mass destruction. Also: un.org I recommend Articles 1 and 2. WW2 was just over and drafters and signatories had it very fresh in their experience. Chapter 7, also.