Admiral Warns Cybersecurity Threat Looms For U.S.

InformationWeek.com ^ | November 10, 2009 | Alexander Wolfe

[khnyny]

This week's 60 Minutes broadcast should make everyone afraid, very afraid, of the real, looming specter of cyberwarfare attacks. As I recently blogged, government agencies are already going full-bore to come up with guidelines to protect federal networks. So when an Admiral goes on national television to say hackers have the ability to take down our power grid, he's doing it to deliver a warning.

I was actually poised to turn off the segment, which I happened upon by accident following Sunday's last-minute Giants loss. Half-expecting the usual security for dummies piece, I was surprised to see an unusually detailed (for TV) dive into the subject by correspondent Steve Kroft. What I wondered about most was, why were the likes of retired Admiral, and former NSA director, Mike McConnell and Jim Lewis, director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, blabbing away about vulnerabilities in domestic networks?

Here's McConnell:

"Do you believe our adversaries have the capability of bringing down a power grid?" Kroft asked McConnell. "I do," McConnell replied.

To give some ummph to his warning, McConnell leaked the previously undisclosed news that a series of power-grid outages in Brazil in 2005 and 2007 were caused by hackers.

And here's Lewis, discussing a breach which was publicly reported at the time (see DoD Admits to Being Severely Hacked).

"In 2007 we probably had our electronic Pearl Harbor. It was an espionage Pearl Harbor," Lewis said. "Some unknown foreign power, and honestly, we don't know who it is, broke into the Department of Defense, to the Department of State, the Department of Commerce, probably the Department of Energy, probably NASA. They broke into all of the high tech agencies, all of the military agencies, and downloaded terabytes of information." This was a serious attack.

[stephenjohnbanker]

It’s those darn WASP grandmothers!!

[GovernmentShrinker]

It’s as likely to be the Chinese as the jihadists. Also possibly the Russians. Also possibly someone who’s selling info to whoever the highest bidder is. We jump to conclusions at our peril on this subject.

[Outlaw Woman]

No worries about protection are needed since the enemies are in the WH and throughout top levels of all departments. There will be no further attacks...at least those of the cyber kind

[stephenjohnbanker]

“It’s as likely to be the Chinese as the jihadists. Also possibly the Russians. “

Or Iran, or ANY of our enemies. They have nothing to fear from this administration.

[holden]

And we know 0bambi's wants to shine our flashlight on our former friends, the Israelis, not the Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, Saudis or Chinese.

HF

[paulcissa]

I’m good friends with a guy that does cyber-sec for a NY-metro region power distribution company (which I’ll leave un-named in respect to my friend) and he says the chi-coms are consistently probing the grid control systems looking for weakness. It’s a non-stop effort that costs most of his days in monitoring, tracking and reporting.

[khnyny]

Imho, the reason they went public is to spotlight the problem with our public utility companies. The public utility companies are more worried about their stock price and shareholder dividend than solving this problem. They are behind the curve and public attention needs to force them to take action immediately.

[khnyny]

For anyone who’s interested, here’s the 60 minutes story:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/11/06/60minutes/main5555565.shtml

Cyber War: Sabotaging the System

[snowrip]

bttt

[edcoil]

I sure am glad president o has a cybersecurity czar...

[The Comedian]

Headline:

"In Response to Cyber-Terrorism, Obama Shuts Down Drudge, FreeRepublic"

Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.

[cranked]

What is he saying that has not already been said or extensively reported or written about for the last decade?

[chuck_the_tv_out]

"60 Minutes broadcast should make everyone afraid, very afraid"

Yeah, in general.

[khnyny]

They admit that the blackouts in Brazil (2005, 2007, I think) were the result of cyberwar. For people not in IT, I’m sure it was a revelation.

[AFreeBird]

It’s as likely to be the Chinese as the jihadists.

I check my home router's logs from time to time and lookup the IP addresses of all the probes I get. 90%+ of them come from China.

They're probing everything, everywhere.