Foiling Computer Hackers Top
Priority With FBI, CIA, Pentagon, NSA
Source: PRNewswire
February 13, 2000
NEW YORK - CIA Director George Tenet tells Newsweek that
foiling computer hackers is a top law-enforcement priority, with the
Pentagon, FBI, CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) all
searching for ways to stay one step ahead of a sophisticated, and
often unseen, enemy.
Washington Correspondent Greg Vistica reports that in
recent years, officials have also secretly observed attempts by
foreign countries to penetrate U.S. government computers. According to
one study, at least 13 countries have "information warfare" programs
directed against the United States. "It’s the Chinese, the French,
Israelis, attacking American targets and doing it quite successfully,"
says one NSA official. The NSA’s computers crunch information from
America’s spy satellites and global eavesdropping network. Last year,
Russian hackers successfully penetrated gaps in Pentagon computer
security, and made off with at least some classified material.
According to one
intelligence report reviewed by Newsweek, the methods the hackers used
are "impossible . . . to detect."
U.S. officials acknowledge that they catch only about 10
percent of those who probe or penetrate government computers. But
they’re working to increase the numbers by beefing up surveillance,
installing intruder-detection programs and limiting the number of
people with computer access to sensitive information, Vistica reports
in the February 21 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, February
14). They’ve also begun to use their own hackers to test the system
and find weaknesses. In 1997, a team of NSA hackers managed to shut
down
the Pentagon’s top-secret National Military Command Center. They left
just one fax machine working.
A little after 7 p.m. Eastern standard time on Jan. 24,
nearly half the computing power in the world went dead. The top secret
National Security Agency’s massive array of supercomputers -- which
crunch information from America’s spy satellites and global
eavesdropping network -- mysteriously shut down for three days.
Panicked, NSA brass at first feared the shutdown might have been
caused by hackers. For a year the agency had been engaged in a
cat-and-mouse war with a persistent group of cyber warriors attempting
to gain access to the computer network. NSA analysts had traced their
footprints back to the University of California, Berkeley, but hadn’t
caught them -- and still haven’t.
NSA officials now suspect human error and a computer
glitch may have caused that meltdown. But it wasn’t farfetched to
believe hackers were to blame. In recent years, cyber attacks on
sensitive government computer systems have become a serious problem.
CIA Director George Tenet told Newsweek that foiling hackers is a top
law-enforcement priority, with the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and NSA all
scrambling to find
ways to stay one step ahead of a sophisticated, and often unseen,
enemy.
Federal officials are especially concerned about attacks
on the country’s increasingly computer-controlled infrastructure. A
1996 presidential commission found that the nation’s power grids,
airports, rail systems, hospitals and even space program are all
vulnerable to attack. These systems, which are considered less
protected than military or law-enforcement computers, are attractive
targets for thrill-seeking hackers trying to see how much havoc they
can cause from their laptops. In 1997 a hacker temporarily severed one
of NASA’s uplinks to the Atlantis shuttle. Several times in the ’90s
emergency 911 service in Eastern states was knocked out when hackers
flooded the phone lines with automatic-dialing software.
The sheer volume of attacks is alarming. The Pentagon
alone estimates its computer networks are hacked about 250,000 times a
year. Most of the intruders are relatively harmless thrill seekers.
But at least 500 are considered serious attempts at breaking into
classified systems. In 1998 three teenage hackers broke into heavily
protected Air Force and Navy computers, leaving "trapdoors" that
allowed them to return
undetected.
In recent years officials have also secretly observed
attempts by foreign countries to penetrate U.S. government computers.
According to one study, at least 13 countries have "information
warfare" programs directed against the United States. "It’s the
Chinese, the French, Israelis, attacking American targets and doing it
quite successfully,"
says one NSA official. Last year Russian hackers successfully
penetrated gaps in Pentagon computer security, and made off with at
least some classified material. The Russians may still have access to
top-secret computers. According to one intelligence report reviewed by
Newsweek, the methods the hackers used are "impossible . . . to
detect."
U.S. officials acknowledge that they catch about 10
percent of those who probe or penetrate government computers. But
they’re working to increase the numbers by beefing up surveillance,
installing intruder-detection programs and limiting the number of
people with computer access to sensitive information. They’ve also
begun to use their own hackers to find weaknesses. In 1997 a team of
NSA hackers managed to shut down the Pentagon’s top-secret National
Military Command Center. They left just one fax machine working --
enough to send the brass a note to let them know they’d been hacked.
&coyp 2000 PRNewswire
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