The Kansas City Star February 12, 2010
Worries grow about America's cyber security
By Scott Canon
The deputy secretary of defense says “the cyber threat” is the one thing that keeps him up at night.
The director of national intelligence says such attacks pose a severe menace to the “fragile system behind the country’s information infrastructure.”
The president says, “America’s economic prosperity in the 21st century will depend on cyber security.”
This is not some hypothetical danger, they point out, but a war that has been joined already. No less a digital dominator than Google has felt the need to enlist the National Security Agency to help it ward off Chinese hackers.
And yet our networked sky has not fallen.
No electronic mischief has sunk Wall Street’s computers. No Internet sabotage has stilled our power plants. No illicit flip-switching in Beijing has released torrents from our dams.
“There’s a little more Hollywood in some of these dire scenarios than reality,” said John Pike, the chief defense analyst at GlobalSecurity.org.
“That said,” he continued, “I like to hope that someone is looking at air traffic control and other things that get scary when someone starts messing around with the controls.”
Indeed, the professionals who puzzle over and prioritize the hazards to national security don’t dismiss the potential of cyber warfare.
They also agree that keeping terrorists out of motherboards will require diligence from government and industry, that it will demand more money from taxpayers and consumers.
What remains less clear, or at least in debate, is whether worries about cyber terror resonate more like Chicken Little or Paul Revere.
“This is a lot of hype,” said Owen Cote, the associate director of the security studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
He sees competing agencies trying to outdo each other in their alarms amid competition to seize control of the responsibility, and the funding, of America’s cyber defenses.
At the same time, many warn that a nearly invisible cyber arms race already is under way. It’s a war with many fronts. Rival governments are trying to outsmart and outmuscle each other’s network defenses. Criminals have employed hacking as a way to steal and extort. Terrorist groups use the Internet to plan and organize, and spy agencies use it to monitor and quash those Web-based maneuvers.
“Global digital warfare is expected to intensify in the near future,” said a report from the Jamestown Foundation, a national security think tank.
That report played out a growing virtual arms war between the United States and China over which country could develop the power to keep hackers at bay from its networks while building the tools to foul the other’s electronic webs in some future conflict.
China, said the Jamestown analysis, “is devoting unprecedented resources to strengthening its already formidable cyber warfare prowess.”
It cites two reasons.
First, a simple desire to keep pace with what Beijing perceives as Washington’s push to dominate cyber battlefields of the near future.
Second, China has problems of its own. Besides what it sees as anti-Chinese propaganda from the West — information that it has been roundly criticized for censoring — some 40,000-plus Web sites in the country were crashed in 2009 and 18 million of its computers were rendered useless by viruses.
“The Internet,” said a top official in Beijing,” has become a major vehicle through which anti-China forces are perpetrating their work of infiltration and sabotage.”
© Copyright 2010, The Kansas City Star
