Cyberwarfare

Trying to Stay One Step Ahead of a Sophisticated, and Often Unseen, Enemy

Foiling Computer Hackers Top Priority With FBI, CIA, Pentagon, NSA

Source: PRNewswire
http://www.russiatoday.com/prnewswire.php3?id=134029

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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