Entries Tagged "infrastructure"

Page 8 of 12

The NSA's Perfect Citizen

In what creepy back room do they come up with these names?

The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed “Perfect Citizen” to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.

The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government’s chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn’t persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.

No reason to be alarmed, though. The NSA claims that this is just research.

Posted on July 16, 2010 at 5:19 AM • View Comments

Jeremy Clarkson on Security Guards

Nice essay:

Of course, we know why he’s really there. He’s really there so that if the bridge is destroyed by terrorists, the authorities can appear on the television news and say they had taken all possible precautions. Plus, if you employ a security guard, then I should imagine that your insurance premiums are going to be significantly lower.

This is probably why so many companies use security guards these days. It must be, because when it comes to preventing a crime, they are pretty much useless. No, really. If you are planning a heist, job one on the list of things to do is “take out the guard”. He is therefore not an impenetrable wall of steel; he’s just a nuisance.

And he’s not just a nuisance to the people planning to hit him on the head. He’s also a nuisance to the thousands of people who legitimately wish to enter or leave the building he’s supposed to be guarding.

At the office where I work, everyone is issued with laminated photo-ID cards that open all the barriers and doors. It is quite impossible to make any sort of progress unless you have such a thing about your person. But even so, every barrier and door is also guarded by a chap who, in a fight, would struggle to beat Christopher Robin. One looks like his heart would give out if you said “boo.” Another has a face that’s so grey that, in some lights, he appears to be slightly lilac. I cannot for the life of me work out what these people are supposed to achieve, apart from making the lives of normal people a little bit more difficult.

EDITED TO ADD (4/13): Another Clarkson essay, this one on security theater.

Posted on March 30, 2010 at 6:06 AM •

Cyber Shockwave Test

There was a big U.S. cyberattack exercise this week. We didn’t do so well:

In a press release issued today, the Bipartisan Policy Center (BPC)—which organized “Cyber Shockwave” using a group of former government officials and computer simulations—concluded the U.S is “unprepared for cyber threats.”

[…]

…the U.S. defenders had difficulty identifying the source of the simulated attack, which in turn made it difficult to take action.

“During the exercise, a server hosting the attack appeared to be based in Russia,” said one report. “However, the developer of the malware program was actually in the Sudan. Ultimately, the source of the attack remained unclear during the event.”

The simulation envisioned an attack that unfolds during a single day in July 2011. When the council convenes to face this crisis, 20 million of the nation’s smartphones have already stopped working. The attack—the result of a malware program that had been planted in phones months earlier through a popular “March Madness” basketball bracket application—disrupts mobile service for millions. The attack escalates, shutting down an electronic energy trading platform and crippling the power grid on the Eastern seaboard.

This is, I think, an eyewitness report.

Posted on February 19, 2010 at 1:33 PM • View Comments

Cyberwarfare Policy

National Journal has an excellent article on cyberwar policy. I agree with the author’s comments on The Atlantic blog:

Would the United States ever use a more devastating weapon, perhaps shutting off the lights in an adversary nation? The answer is, almost certainly no, not unless America were attacked first.

To understand why, forget about the cyber dimension for a moment. Imagine that some foreign military had flown over a power substation and Brazil and dropped a bomb on it, depriving electricity to millions of people, as well as the places they work, the hospitals they visit, and the transportation they use. If there were no official armed conflict between Brazil and its attacker, the bombing would be illegal under international law. That’s a pretty basic test. But even if there were a declared war, or a recognized state of hostilities, knocking out vital electricity to millions of citizens—who presumably are not soldiers in the fight—would fail a number of other basic requirements of the laws of armed conflict. For starters, it could be considered disproportionate, particularly if Brazil hadn’t launched any similar sized offensive on its adversary. Shutting off electricity to whole cities can effectively paralyze them. And the bombing would clearly target non-combatants. The government uses electricity, yes, but so does the entire civilian population.

Now add the cyber dimension. If the effect of a hacker taking down the power grid is the same as a bomber—that is, knocking out electrical power—then the same rules apply. That essentially was the conclusion of a National Academies of Sciences report in April. The authors write, “During acknowledged armed conflict (notably when kinetic and other means are also being used against the same target nation), cyber attack is governed by all the standard law of armed conflict. …If the effects of a kinetic attack are such that the attack would be ruled out on such grounds, a cyber attack that would cause similar effects would also be ruled out.”

[…]

According to a report in The Guardian, military planners refrained from launching a broad cyber attack against Serbia during the Kosovo conflict for fear of committing war crimes. The Pentagon theoretically had the power to “bring Serbia’s financial systems to a halt” and to go after the personal accounts of Slobodan Milosevic, the newspaper reported. But when the NATO-led bombing campaign was in full force, the Defense Department’s general counsel issued guidance on cyber war that said the law of (traditional) war applied.

The military ran into this same dilemma four years later, during preparations to invade Iraq in 2003. Planners considered whether to launch a massive attack on the Iraqi financial system in advance of the conventional strike. But they stopped short when they realized that the same networks used by Iraqi banks were also used by banks in France. Releasing a vicious computer virus into the system could potentially harm America’s allies. Some planners also worried that the contagion could spread to the United States. It could have been the cyber equivalent of nuclear fallout.

A 240-page Rand study by Martin Libicki—”Cyberdefense and Cyberwar“—came to the same conclusion:

Predicting what an attack can do requires knowing how the system and its operators will respond to signs of dysfunction and knowing the behavior of processes and systems associated with the system being attacked. Even then, cyberwar operations neither directly harm individuals nor destroy equipment (albeit with some exceptions). At best, these operations can confuse and frustrate operators of military systems, and then only temporarily. Thus, cyberwar can only be a support function for other elements of warfare, for instance, in disarming the enemy.

Commenting on the Rand report:

The report backs its findings by measuring probable outcomes to cyberattacks and determining that the results are too scattered to carry out accurate predictions. This is coupled with the problem of countering an attack. It is difficult to determine who conducted a specific cyberattack so any counter strikes or retaliations could backfire. Rather than going on the offensive, the United States should pursue diplomacy and attempt to find and prosecute the cybercriminals involved in an initial strike.

Libicki said that the military can attempt a cyberattack for a specific combat operation, but it would be a guessing game when trying to gauge the operation’s success since any result from the cyberattack would be unclear.

Instead the Rand report suggests the government invest in bolstering military networks, which as we know, have the same vulnerabilities as civilian networks.

I wrote about cyberwar back in 2005.

Posted on December 1, 2009 at 6:59 AM • View Comments

Security in a Reputation Economy

In the past, our relationship with our computers was technical. We cared what CPU they had and what software they ran. We understood our networks and how they worked. We were experts, or we depended on someone else for expertise. And security was part of that expertise.

This is changing. We access our email via the web, from any computer or from our phones. We use Facebook, Google Docs, even our corporate networks, regardless of hardware or network. We, especially the younger of us, no longer care about the technical details. Computing is infrastructure; it’s a commodity. It’s less about products and more about services; we simply expect it to work, like telephone service or electricity or a transportation network.

Infrastructures can be spread on a broad continuum, ranging from generic to highly specialized. Power and water are generic; who supplies them doesn’t really matter. Mobile phone services, credit cards, ISPs, and airlines are mostly generic. More specialized infrastructure services are restaurant meals, haircuts, and social networking sites. Highly specialized services include tax preparation for complex businesses; management consulting, legal services, and medical services.

Sales for these services are driven by two things: price and trust. The more generic the service is, the more price dominates. The more specialized it is, the more trust dominates. IT is something of a special case because so much of it is free. So, for both specialized IT services where price is less important and for generic IT services—think Facebook—where there is no price, trust will grow in importance. IT is becoming a reputation-based economy, and this has interesting ramifications for security.

Some years ago, the major credit card companies became concerned about the plethora of credit-card-number thefts from sellers’ databases. They worried that these might undermine the public’s trust in credit cards as a secure payment system for the internet. They knew the sellers would only protect these databases up to the level of the threat to the seller, and not to the greater level of threat to the industry as a whole. So they banded together and produced a security standard called PCI. It’s wholly industry-enforced ­ by an industry that realized its reputation was more valuable than the sellers’ databases.

A reputation-based economy means that infrastructure providers care more about security than their customers do. I realized this 10 years ago with my own company. We provided network-monitoring services to large corporations, and our internal network security was much more extensive than our customers’. Our customers secured their networks—that’s why they hired us, after all—but only up to the value of their networks. If we mishandled any of our customers’ data, we would have lost the trust of all of our customers.

I heard the same story at an ENISA conference in London last June, when an IT consultant explained that he had begun encrypting his laptop years before his customers did. While his customers might decide that the risk of losing their data wasn’t worth the hassle of dealing with encryption, he knew that if he lost data from one customer, he risked losing all of his customers.

As IT becomes more like infrastructure, more like a commodity, expect service providers to improve security to levels greater than their customers would have done themselves.

In IT, customers learn about company reputation from many sources: magazine articles, analyst reviews, recommendations from colleagues, awards, certifications, and so on. Of course, this only works if customers have accurate information. In a reputation economy, companies have a motivation to hide their security problems.

You’ve all experienced a reputation economy: restaurants. Some restaurants have a good reputation, and are filled with regulars. When restaurants get a bad reputation, people stop coming and they close. Tourist restaurants—whose main attraction is their location, and whose customers frequently don’t know anything about their reputation—can thrive even if they aren’t any good. And sometimes a restaurant can keep its reputation—an award in a magazine, a special occasion restaurant that “everyone knows” is the place to go—long after its food and service have declined.

The reputation economy is far from perfect.

This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.

Posted on November 12, 2009 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

Hacking the Brazil Power Grid

We’ve seen lots of rumors about attacks against the power grid, both in the U.S. and elsewhere, of people hacking the power grid. President Obama mentioned it in his May cybersecurity speech: “In other countries cyberattacks have plunged entire cities into darkness.” Seems like the source of these rumors has been Brazil:

Several prominent intelligence sources confirmed that there were a series of cyber attacks in Brazil: one north of Rio de Janeiro in January 2005 that affected three cities and tens of thousands of people, and another, much larger event beginning on Sept. 26, 2007.

That one in the state of Espirito Santo affected more than three million people in dozens of cities over a two-day period, causing major disruptions. In Vitoria, the world’s largest iron ore producer had seven plants knocked offline, costing the company $7 million. It is not clear who did it or what the motive was.

60 Minutes called me during the research of this story. They had a lot more unsubstantiated information than they’re provided here: names of groups that were involved, allegations of extortion, government coverups, and so on. It would be nice to know what really happened.

EDITED TO ADD (11/11): Wired says that the attacks were caused by sooty insulators. The counterargument, of course, is that sooty insulators are just the cover story because the whole hacker thing is secret.

Wired also mentions that, in an interview last month, Richard Clarke named Brazil as a victim of these attacks.

Posted on November 11, 2009 at 12:19 PM • View Comments

Terrorist Risk of Cloud Computing

I don’t even know where to begin on this one:

As we have seen in the past with other technologies, while cloud resources will likely start out decentralized, as time goes by and economies of scale take hold, they will start to collect into mega-technology hubs. These hubs could, as the end of this cycle, number in the low single digits and carry most of the commerce and data for a nation like ours. Elsewhere, particularly in Europe, those hubs could handle several nations’ public and private data.

And therein lays the risk.

The Twin Towers, which were destroyed in the 9/11 attack, took down a major portion of the U.S. infrastructure at the same time. The capability and coverage of cloud-based mega-hubs would easily dwarf hundreds of Twin Tower-like operations. Although some redundancy would likely exist—hopefully located in places safe from disasters—should a hub be destroyed, it could likely take down a significant portion of the country it supported at the same time.

[…]

Each hub may represent a target more attractive to terrorists than today’s favored nuclear power plants.

It’s only been eight years, and this author thinks that the 9/11 attacks “took down a major portion of the U.S. infrastructure.” That’s just plain ridiculous. I was there (in the U.S, not in New York). The government, the banks, the power system, commerce everywhere except lower Manhattan, the Internet, the water supply, the food supply, and every other part of the U.S. infrastructure I can think of worked just fine during and after the attacks. The New York Stock Exchange was up and running in a few days. Even the piece of our infrastructure that was the most disrupted—the airplane network—was up and running in a week. I think the author of that piece needs to travel to somewhere on the planet where major portions of the infrastructure actually get disrupted, so he can see what it’s like.

No less ridiculous is the main point of the article, which seems to imply that terrorists will someday decide that disrupting people’s Lands’ End purchases will be more attractive than killing them. Okay, that was a caricature of the article, but not by much. Terrorism is an attack against our minds, using random death and destruction as a tactic to cause terror in everyone. To even suggest that data disruption would cause more terror than nuclear fallout completely misunderstands terrorism and terrorists.

And anyway, any e-commerce, banking, etc. site worth anything is backed up and dual-homed. There are lots of risks to our data networks, but physically blowing up a data center isn’t high on the list.

Posted on July 6, 2009 at 6:12 AM • View Comments

Fear of Aerial Images

Time for some more fear about terrorists using maps and images on the Internet.

But the more striking images come when Portzline clicks on the “bird’s-eye” option offered by the map service. The overhead views, which come chiefly from satellites, are replaced with strikingly clear oblique-angle photos, chiefly shot from aircraft. By clicking another button, he can see the same building from all four sides.

“What we’re seeing here is a guard shack,” Portzline said, pointing to a rooftop structure. “This is a communications device for the nuclear plant.”

He added, “This particular building is the air intake for the control room. And there’s some nasty thing you could do to disable the people in the control room. So this type of information should not be available. I look at this and just say, ‘Wow.’ ”

Terror expert and author Brian Jenkins agreed that the pictures are “extraordinarily impressive.”

“If I were a terrorist planning an attack, I would want that imagery. That would facilitate that mission,” he said. “And given the choice between renting an airplane or trying some other way to get it, versus tapping in some things on my computer, I certainly want to do the latter. (It will) reduce my risk, and the first they’re going to know about my attack is when it takes place.”

Gadzooks, people, enough with the movie plots.

Joel Anderson, a member of the California Assembly, has more expansive goals. He has introduced a bill in the state Legislature that would prohibit “virtual globe” services from providing unblurred pictures of schools, churches and government or medical facilities in California. It also would prohibit those services from providing street-view photos of those buildings.

“It struck me that a person in a tent halfway around the world could target an attack like that with a laptop computer,” said Anderson, a Republican legislator who represents San Diego’s East County. Anderson said he doesn’t want to limit technology, but added, “There’s got to be some common sense.”

I wonder why he thinks that “schools, churches and government or medical facilities” are terrorist targets worth protecting, and movie theaters, stadiums, concert halls, restaurants, train stations, shopping malls, Toys-R-Us stores on the day after Thanksgiving, train stations, and theme parks are not. After all, “there’s got to be some common sense.”

Now, both have launched efforts to try to get Internet map services to remove or blur images of sensitive sites, saying the same technology that allows people to see a neighbor’s swimming pool can be used by terrorists to chose targets and plan attacks.

Yes, and the same technology that allows people to call their friends can be used by terrorists to choose targets and plan attacks. And the same technology that allows people to commute to work can be used by terrorists to plan and execute attacks. And the same technology that allows you to read this blog post…repeat until tired.

Of course, this is nothing I haven’t said before:

Criminals have used telephones and mobile phones since they were invented. Drug smugglers use airplanes and boats, radios and satellite phones. Bank robbers have long used cars and motorcycles as getaway vehicles, and horses before then. I haven’t seen it talked about yet, but the Mumbai terrorists used boats as well. They also wore boots. They ate lunch at restaurants, drank bottled water, and breathed the air. Society survives all of this because the good uses of infrastructure far outweigh the bad uses, even though the good uses are—by and large—small and pedestrian and the bad uses are rare and spectacular. And while terrorism turns society’s very infrastructure against itself, we only harm ourselves by dismantling that infrastructure in response—just as we would if we banned cars because bank robbers used them too.

You’re not going to stop terrorism by deliberately degrading our infrastructure. Refuse to be terrorized, everyone.

Posted on June 8, 2009 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

1 … 6 7 8 9 10 … 12

Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.