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[infowar.de] U.S. Cyber Chief to Map Infrastructure for Security
Infowar.de, http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~bendrath/liste.html
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Tuesday December 4 5:36 PM ET
U.S. Cyber Chief to Map Infrastructure for Security
By Andy Sullivan
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government plans to develop a model of
the nation's railroads, gas pipelines, telecommunications networks and
other
``critical infrastructures'' to better understand how they affect each
other, the nation's top cybersecurity chief said on Tuesday.
As part of its efforts to beef up homeland security, the federal
government will set up a national center for infrastructure simulation
and analysis in January, said
Richard Clarke, chairman of President Bush's Critical Infrastructure
Protection Board.
``The center will create, if you will, an acupuncture map of the
country, so that if there is a fire in a railroad tunnel in Baltimore,
we know the Internet slows down in
Chicago,'' Clarke told a gathering of high-tech executives at the
Business Software Alliance's first Global Tech Summit.
The simulation is another attempt by the federal government to secure
the nation's sprawling telecommunications networks in the wake of the
Sept. 11 hijacking
attacks that killed 3,600 in New York and Washington.
``We have migrated function after function into the IT (information
technology) cloud without thinking about security,'' he said.
One way to do that, Clarke suggested in October, would be to build a
secure computer network for government agencies completely separated
from the Internet,
dubbed ``Govnet.''
While his idea has received a mixed reception from the high-tech
community, Clarke said Tuesday that the government had received 167
private-sector proposals
on how to build Govnet.
The ideas were being reviewed by the government and a separate team at
Carnegie Mellon University, he said.
Govnet would not necessarily be built entirely from scratch, he said,
but assembled from existing agency-specific networks. It could use
fingerprint scanners, iris
scanners or other ``biometric'' devices to screen users, he said.
``With all these things, we might be able to set an example with
Govnet,'' he said.
Clarke also appealed to the private sector, which controls the vast
majority of the Internet's infrastructure, to beef up its security
practices as well.
``We need to decide that IT security functionality will be built into
what we do. It's not an afterthought anymore,'' he said.
Software products should be shipped with security settings at their
highest level, he said, and high-speed Internet providers should require
individual users to install
''firewalls'' to protect against damaging viruses.
Software companies should not just make ``patches'' available to fix
vulnerabilities in their products, but automatically update users'
software for them, he said.
``It's not beyond the wit of this industry to figure out a way of
forcing down these patches,'' he said.
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/htx/nm/20011204/tc/tech_security_dc_1.html
--
Olivier Minkwitz___________________________________________
Dipl. Pol., wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter
HSFK Hessische Stiftung für Friedens- und Konfliktforschung
PRIF Peace Research Institute Frankfurt
Leimenrode 29 60322 Frankfurt a/M Germany
Tel +49 (0)69 9591 0422 Fax +49 (0)69 5584 81
Mobil 0172 3196 006
http://www.hsfk.de
minkwitz -!
- hsfk -
de___________________________________________
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