[infowar.de] the Reg.: Fed: Cyberterror fears missed real threat

[a - schmdt -! - t-online - de (Andreas Schmidt)]

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http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/32111.html
Fed: Cyberterror fears missed real threat
By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus
Posted: 01/08/2003 at 06:58 GMT
 
LAS VEGAS--When airliners crashed into the World Trade Center and the 
Pentagon on September 11th, 2001, the nature of the attack took America's 
defenders by surprise. They were expecting hackers. 

"We were very shocked in the federal government that the attack didn't 
come from cyberspace," said Marcus Sachs, cyber program director in the 
Department of Homeland Security. 

Speaking at the Black Hat Briefings here Thursday, Sachs ran through the 
history of the U.S. government's interest in information operations and 
"cyber terrorism," the Tom Clancy-esque theory that rogue nation states 
and terrorist groups would attack the U.S. by hacking into the computers 
controlling critical infrastructures, like the electric grid or air 
traffic control systems. 

>From the Pentagon's 1997 "Eligible Receiver" exercise, which demonstrated 
that military computers were vulnerable to disruption, through the 1998 
"Solar Sunrise" intrusions traced to two California teens and their 
Israeli mentor, to the mysterious "Moonlight Maze" hack attacks against 
unclassified defense systems, defense thinkers in two administrations 
looked with dread to cyberspace in the idleness that followed the end of 
the Cold War. In 1998, President Clinton responded to the cyber terror 
fears by signing Presidential Decision Directive 63, launching a broad 
public-private partnership aimed at locking down electronic security 
holes. 

At times, the technology hype that inflated the dot-com boom in Silicon 
Valley seemed to have a dark mirror image in the dire predictions of an 
impending "electronic Pearl Harbor" coming from Washington. In 1999, 
influential Republican congressman Curt Weldon of the House Armed Services 
Committee said he placed the threat of cyber attack as more serious than 
the danger posed by weapons of mass destruction or missile proliferation. 
In March, 2001, President Bush's national security advisor Condoleezza 
Rice spoke at a cyber security policy forum to declare that vulnerable 
U.S. computers were America's "soft underbelly." 

"Based on what we knew at the time, the most likely scenario was an attack 
from cyberspace, not airliners slamming into buildings," said Sachs, in an 
interview after his keynote. 

Sachs was formerly the Director for Communication Infrastructure 
Protection in the White House Office of Cyberspace Security, and a staff 
member of the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. 

While he stops short of saying that Washington's cyber terror obsession 
was a blunder, Sachs acknowledges that, in hindsight, the effort was 
misdirected. "We had spent a lot of time preparing for a cyber attack, not 
a physical attack," says Sachs. "Our priorities had to change a little 
bit." 

That's not to say that Sachs doesn't believe that cyber security is 
important to America's economic security. Part of the DHS's Information 
Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Directorate, the group he heads now 
is responsible for building an implementation plan for the White House's 
National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. In his keynote, he spoke of the 
need to promulgate a "culture of security" from the end user up through 
the top layers of corporate and governmental hierarchies, to better secure 
government computers to make them an example to others, and the importance 
of international cooperation to secure the Internet. 

But he also emphasized the need to provide physical protection to critical 
infrastructures. The September 11 attacks caused serious damage to a 
Verizon central office adjacent to the World Trade Center, triggering 
service outages. "What we learned in New York City is the physical 
infrastructure and the cyber infrastructure are closely tied together." 

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