Cyber-Attacks?

Galahad2 writes "The Washington Post has a lengthy article about the Bush administration's fears of an Al Qaeda cyber attack on the nation's infrastructure. Though we have all seen this sort of attack as a possiblity for a long time, I'm having a hard time believing that Al Qaeda is capable of anything along these lines." You're not the only one. The article does cite an example of the only known infrastructure attack, a case in Australia where a consultant used his inside knowledge of a local sewage treatment system to dump raw sewage, hoping for a contract to solve the problem he created.

Comments

Re:In summary

[nordicfrost]

Well, when I was in the military, working on multimedia apps, I was impressed by the security precautions on the computers... We really wanted to make one of the servers accessible from the 'net because of the nature of the app. We applied to the HQ to be allowed to make the info on the server available from outside the secure digital phonelines. This was a "Restricted" server, the first security level in our classification system. The HQ said, "of course you can connect it to the 'net. On one condition; you must install a firewall". "No prob", I said. Then they answered; "oh yeah, one more demand. The firewall must be 100% intrusion secure, guaranteed by you personally. Not 99,9997%, not even 99,999999% but 100% secure. Then and only then can you put the server on the 'net." It never accessed the 'net.

Security in the military is amazing. At least here. Any computer net designed for "Classified" to "Secret" is not allowed to be connected to ANYTHING except a fiber-op LAN. No floppy, no HDD, Windows boots from servers. The parallel and serial ports are removed, keyboard cords are glued to the machine, cabinet locked with padlock... The network I spent most of my time on had nothing more secret than the SSN of several persons, but that info is "Classified" so we had the server in a EMP-safe, TEMPEST-classified locked concrete room. The fib-op was in concrete ducts, the switch cabinets were thin safes, backups were stored in two separate fireproof vaults... I dare you. Hack that server, my guess is that it is next to impossible, primarily because of the NoNet-policy. Any computer connected to the 'net is automatically classified as "Unsafe" no matter what firewall in between. A computer that is "Unsafe" is not allowed to be next to a secure computer(!). This is to avoid human confusion...