U.S. Fears Al Qaeda Cyber Attacks (A MUST-READ)

The Washington Post ^ | June 26, 2002 | Barton Gellman

[altair]

You could no more bring down a network with ASN.1 than you could a UNIX system with a bootleg copy of yacc.

Bad example. This has been done before, only with the C compiler not yacc.

[Mitchell]

Thanks for the suggestions.

[Mitchell]

How do we know that the terrorists haven't been engaged in disruptive activities along the lines you suggest? The government wouldn't announce it or admit it in any way (even if they were aware of it, which is doubtful). Acknowledging terror attacks could cause a decline in our markets and our economy; plus, the attacks would be perceived by many as terrorist successes. Thus it may be good strategy to deny terrorist acts when one can.

This extends even to full-fledged terrorist actions, which will often be denied if possible, rather than acknowledge a terrorist success. With the AA 587 crash investigation, for example, it's likely that the U.S. government would say exactly the same things whether it were an accident or sabotage, unless the sabotage were so obvious that it couldn't be denied. (I don't pretend to know whether it was an accident or not, and I'm not accusing the government of lying. It may have been an accident, just as they say. My point is that it's difficult for us to tell, since the government would be saying the same thing either way.) The same thing applies to the Toulouse petrochemical plant explosion and the French government.

[Mitchell]

National resources of the Islamic nations and China may be coordinating. This unholy alliance is the sophistication and cyber shock troops which we must not underestimate.

I agree; this possible alliance is the single biggest risk we face. Within this "axis of evil," China could supply various kinds of essential technical expertise and other behind-the-scenes support, while the Islamic extremists would supply soldiers with fanatical zeal and mobs bent on destruction; the Islamic terrorists would also provide plausible deniability for China.

As for this article itself, many of the details are not very believable technically, but the overall thrust is.

I'd like to point out a few quotes from the article, followed by some possibly related information from September, 2001:

...after the Sept. 11 attacks, air traffic controllers brought down every commercial plane in the air. "If there had been a cyber-attack at the same time that prevented them from doing that," he said, "the magnitude of the event could have been much greater."
...
"I don't think they are capable of bringing a major segment of this country to its knees using cyber-attack alone," said an official representing the current consensus, but "they would be able to conduct an integrated attack using a combination of physical and cyber resources and get an amplification of consequences."
...
Sources said the government did not learn crucial details about September's Nimda worm, which caused an estimated $530 million in damage, until the stricken companies began firing their security executives.

Nimda was released exactly one week, probably to the minute, after the 9/11 attack. And this was on the same date, 9/18/2001, that the first anthrax mailings were postmarked.

Nimda is the most virulent worm to hit the Internet yet, propagating via a variety of methods. And it placed back doors on the compromised computers, leaving them wide open to possible further misuse at a later date.

Although the origin of Nimda is unknown, the best guess, for a variety of reasons, is China.

[defenderSD]

I don't think you need to be quite so explicit with your terror ideas. You can make your point without giving the wrong people the wrong ideas.

[Cachelot]

the terrorists could do something like find a hacker with a bunch of credit card numbers (like that one that supposedly had 300k of them from CD Universe) and publish them on the web.

Wouldn't work. The kiddies do that sort of stuff all the time, and the card companies do have pretty good stoppers in place ;).

[RightOnline]

With all due respect, I really don't think these a**holes need any suggestions, thank you very much.

[eno_]

I'm old enough to have been writing UNIX device drivers for a living when Ken Thompson's C compiler 'sploit was first discussed. That is an example of is why even source-code-audited systems are not totally immune to back doors. You have to audit the code the compiler generates, and there may even be theoretical limits on how comprehensively that can be done.

But the effectiveness of this kind of 'sploit, like every other kind, is limited by the diversity of implementations out there. There is no mother of all protocol compilers that could have been infected with a trojan, and that one could use to bring down all networks. Nor is there any other one-size-fits-all exploit, nor even a manageable collection of them that any group short of an NSA or GCHQ type government agency could possibly make any practical use of.

[eno_]

I think you have put your finger on something here. there was a train derailment in London where some fake track workers were spotted on a security camera. And there were some suspicious rail accidents in the U.S., too. But, of course, our media goes baa baa baa into the sheep pen and never even reports on the astronomical coincidence of how the 9/11 hijackers crossed paths with some anthrax victims in Florida. Not every attack will be spectactular.

[ko_kyi]

You and I think similarly. I was thinking of writing a short story set as an "after-action" report in 2050, the year the Constitution was dissolved and Sharia declared in the US. Many of the steps are similar to what you describe. The attack on mosques in the US was part of it, and Islam became a specially protected religion. Another part was factionalizing the US military by using American converts as an undercover faction.

[astounded]

Then again, who in America ever dreamt that terrorists would drive fully laden jetliners into the sides of buildings? Nothing should be ruled out. Remember, we are in a hot war with an enemy who is determined to bring us down. They will, however, fail.

[astounded]

My sentiments exactly. These control systems can be completely isolated from any "connection" to the web. Access then is denied.

[Alouette]

Hard for Joe Blow from Kansas to pass himself off as a Muslim dedicated to the jihad.

Not so hard for Johnny Lindh from Marin County, California

[happygrl]

Thanks for posting this important article.

It seems that, though the trigger may not be relevant, the vulnerablities pointed out by the Y2K Prophets were accurate.

[b4its2late]

I know some people who will be wiping their ass in 2030 with toilet paper they bought in 1999.

LOL! But they may be the ones that have the last laugh when the government creates the "toilet paper tax".....

[palmer]

wiping their ass in 2030 with toilet paper they bought in 1999

LOL. They might want to save some for the 31 bit time rollover in 2037.

[Prodigal Son]

Not so hard for Johnny Lindh from Marin County, California

Aye, but he was a believer. Somebody else already mentioned that they probably make you do something ugly to prove yourself and no doubt he had to prove himself before he gained their trust.

[Prodigal Son]

As far as that goes, this entire article should also not be in the public domain, nor Tom Clancy's novel with the terrorist flying the plane into the White House.

What are my secrets that I'm giving away? Hell, the Germans let loose the idea about flying remote control model planes into aircraft at the airport- I never thought of that. The things I list are kindergarten stuff compared to what anybody with the bent or inclination could dream up and most of 'em have already been mentioned countless times in the media and on Free Republic. Attacking the power grid? Cyber attacks? Bridges, roads, trains? This is the first time you've heard these things as possible actions a terrorist might take? Scuba terror. Shipping container terror. Bio terror. Cyanide in the water terror. Fourth of July terror. Mall bombing terror. Nothing I've mentioned is untouched upon before.

[steve-b]

I can't think of a better way to defeat them than to infiltrate them.

If a loser like Padilla can get in, but the CIA can't, we ought to disband the CIA and build a new organization out of people who have a clue.

[Prodigal Son]

How do we know that the terrorists haven't been engaged in disruptive activities along the lines you suggest? The government wouldn't announce it or admit it in any way (even if they were aware of it, which is doubtful). Acknowledging terror attacks could cause a decline in our markets and our economy; plus, the attacks would be perceived by many as terrorist successes. Thus it may be good strategy to deny terrorist acts when one can.

I thought about that too. But if I were the terrorists I would simply make my announcements to the media who would be much more reliable to publish it than the gov't.

The whole sabotage scheme I mentioned wouldn't in and of itself actually cause that much damage. It would be the diversion of resources (police,National Guard, emergency teams, power line crews etc) and just the general feeling of unease, I believe, that would be the main rewards for such things. I mean let's face it, Nature does more destruction on a weekly basis than "monkey wrenching" ever could.

But to stretch the response/security services would have the knock on effect of perhaps opening up "holes" in other places where resources were stretched too thin to cover and if a system/people are on a constant "high alert" it will eventually suffer from battle fatigue.

At any rate, the point of my post was I don't believe al Qaeda is as all pervasive and powerful as we are led to believe sometimes or they're just plain stupid- I tend to think it's a little bit of both. It's like that business about suicide bombers being an eventuality that "we'll just have to face" within our own borders. That served to fan flames of fear, but as one Freeper pointed out- "Where are they? Why are they waiting? If they really wanted to they would have done it by now..."

Another point is, perhaps the whole point to 9/11 wasn't to injure the USA as the end goal they were shooting for. Many pundits figured bin Laden was trying to rally radicals around his cause and he perpetrated these attacks as a way of demonstrating his power to those he wished to unite under his vision. I'm speculating here but it would seem that bin Laden has to be intelligent enough to see that going to war with the USA (even if all of Islam were united in this cause) would be a losing proposition for his people in the long run.

Perhaps his end goal is to gain power in Saudi Arabia and impose his version of what a good Muslim nation should be and also to gain control of the oil and raise its price to force the USA and the West at large to the negotiating table. If he could be seen to stand up to the Great Satan and become a leader on the world scene that we were forced to deal with (thereby giving him legitmacy- think Arafat), perhaps he would even stand a chance at uniting the Arab/Islamic world at large under his command- giving him effective control of a big chunk of the world's population.

Then again, regardless of how intelligent/unintelligent the man is, living that radical outlaw life in Afghanistan no doubt drove him insane enough to think that he could actually bring the US to its knees. He's probably just as bent on wanton destruction as all the other fanatics out there without any thought to long term plans. But he does seem to have a long term plan and the very fact that al Qaeda never officially claims responsibility (the way terrorists have in the past) is quite a niggling point. What good does it do not to claim responsibility? It's puzzling.