by Playfuls Staff |
11th February 2006
There’s a lot more about the world of Internet than meets the simple user’s eye. In an age when the mainframes of all major state institutions are linked to the outside world and the Internet, large scale hacker attacks, or the “cyber-war” are one of the main reasons of concern for any political power. And that’s why the US Homeland Security department has carried out a mock exercise, in order to see how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet.[more]
Thus, on Friday, the Government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame, a large-scale mock cyberattack, aimed at gauging the nation's readiness to any kind of hacker attacks.
Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events, as reported by the Seattle Post Intelligencer.
The Internet survived, even against fictional abuses against the world's computers on a scale typical for Fox's popular "24" television series. Experts depicted hackers who shut down electricity in 10 states, failures in vital systems for online banking and retail sales, infected discs mistakenly distributed by commercial software companies and critical flaws discovered in core Internet technology.
Some mock attacks were aimed at causing a "significant cyber disruption" that could seriously damage energy, transportation and health care industries and undermine public confidence, said George Foresman, an undersecretary at the Homeland Security Department.
"Preparedness against a cyberattack requires partnership and coordination between all levels of government and the private sector," Homeland Security Under Secretary for Preparedness George Foresman said in a statement Friday. "Cyber Storm provides an excellent opportunity to enhance our nation's cyberpreparedness and better manage risk."
What remained unclear was the extent to which the exercise proved successful. The agency said it plans to compile responses from all of the participants and to issue a final report this summer assessing Cyber Storm's performance.
Bob Dix, an executive vice president for Dallas-based Citadel Security Systems, which participated in the simulation, said, according to ZDNet, "We won't have the results for a little while yet." But the very organization of the program, he said, symbolizes "how seriously people are taking (cybersecurity), to try and simulate a situation so that we can evaluate our preparedness and take the necessary steps ahead of time to improve on that."
There was no impact on the real Internet during the weeklong exercise. Government officials from the United States, Canada, Australia and England and executives from Microsoft, Cisco, Verisign and others said they were careful to simulate attacks only using isolated computers, working from basement offices at the Secret Services headquarters in downtown Washington.
Homeland Security coordinated the exercise. More than 115 government agencies, companies and organizations participated. They included the White House National Security Council, Justice Department, Defense Department, State Department, National Security Agency and CIA, which conducted its own cybersecurity exercise called "Silent Horizon" last May.
The exercise is critical because it brings it out of the abstract," said Paul Kurtz, director of the Cyber Security Industry Alliance, which counted some of its member companies among the exercise's participants. "Most importantly, it's not just proving plausibility, it's, 'What do we do? Who does what?'"
The nationwide exercise marked one of several steps that Homeland Security has been taking in recent months as it attempts to raise its cybersecurity profile. Government auditors and cybersecurity analysts have charged that the department is not living up to its responsibilities in that realm.
It remains to be seen what conclusions will be drawn from this exercise, as well as what actions will be taken, but one things is clear: no country is perfectly capable, right now, to withstand a concentrated attack from various cyber-terrorist groups, spread across the world. So, more than ever, at this point, the perspective of a Cyber-WWIII is something quite disturbing, due especially to its level of plausibility.
