CIA's Info Ops Team Hosts 3-Day Cyber Wargame

ScentCone writes "The CIA has booked some conference rooms and is working through a simulated 'digital Pearl Harbor' to see how government and industry handle a monster net attack from an imaginary future foe composed of anti-American and anti-globalization hackers. Having been accused of lacking imagination about potential terror attacks, they're using the exercise to better shape the government's roles in a variety of attack scenarios. The networking industry, it seems, is expected to always play a big part in detecting and thwarting such threats, as 9/11-scale economic disruption is a likely bad-guy objective."

Comments

Comparison in slightly bad taste...

[strider44]

People compare September 11 with a lot of things, but comparing it with a crack-fest? I doubt that it's even *possible* to kill several thousand people with cracking, you could only cause extreme inconvenience.

Besides, security can be achieved through a couple of simple steps: Don't use Windows, use OS's designed with security in mind. Use SELinux or equivalent on mission critical nodes. And secondly, educate the users and gain a culture of safety.

Re:Comparison in slightly bad taste...

[James_Duncan8181]

What? Bringing down a power grid during rush hour, changing details of patient notes on a hospital network, or sending false messages and checking the content of sent messages all have the potential to kill.

Have you no imagination at all? ;)

Re:Comparison in slightly bad taste...

[voixderaison]

I suppose there are a variety of crack scenarios that would result in massive loss of life. Spoofing the air traffic control system in some fantastically improbably way might cause a few mid air collisions before the planes were grounded.

Launching a single nuclear missile would shoot past the mark by rather a lot. Let's hope the control systems for those things are not connected via some backdoor to to a network in turn connected via some other back door to a network connected to the internet, eh?

These crackfest doomsday scenarios are not preparing government for the real problems at hand, today. Consider the case reported by the New York Times last week :

"During a two-day period they watched as the intruder tried to break into more than 100 locations on the Internet and was successful in gaining root access to more than 50. "

It was probably a lone cracker, possibly a small group. rooting fifty boxes in a couple days. That was just a two day sample of a months long probably-one-man crackfest. Low level information theft poses a real threat to national security. Many government agencies are not even able to detect it.

By the way, it seems to be more popular in government circles to invoke September 11, probably because in the current climate it helps get funding. At least there is that perception.

Re:Comparison in slightly bad taste...

[synthespian]

Incidentally, I had to go to Al Jazeera to find that passage- CNN, those J-school dropouts, post a heavily edited version without even mentioning that it was edited.

Yeah, I remember reading the original statement:
"And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [When they pointed out that] for example, al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost - according to the lowest estimate - more than $500 billion.

Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.

As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan - with Allah's permission.

It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is ... you."here)

Actually, at the time I was kind of shocked at the self-imposed censorship of the American media. Sometimes I think the USA has achieved a more effective way of brain-wahing than the Soviets could have ever dreamed of...No in-depth analysis in news media, no space for political discussion, people afraid to vent their political views, a presidential campagin that can only be won with loads of money, indirect elections for president, moralism, fear of "communism" (or, as the neo-macarthist term would have it today "anti-americanism"), etc. And, no, I'm, no a lefty.

"Anti-American and anti-globalization hackers"

[Raindance]

I'm not sure whether this is completely appropriate to include in a press release.

Insofar as the intelligence community is coming up with possible scenarios, yes, I think this is a possible scenario. And worth looking into.

Insofar as the government- MY government- is identifying and singling-out anti-globalization folks as "The Enemy" and "anti-American," I'm a bit frustrated. I'm an American who is also somewhat anti-globalization*.

So, thumbs up for doing some preparation that might actually matter. Thumbs down, however, for singling out anti-globalization as "The Enemy" and "anti-American."

You're the government. You have a responsibility to your citizens to not insult moderate views commonly held by U.S. citizens, however accidentally you do so. If you're going to put out press releases, hire some rhetoric Ph.Ds or something.

*There a lot of ins-and-outs to globalization. I'm against greedy globalization, which so far has unfortunately been rampant.

Re:People don't die when networks crash

[thynk]

It depends on what network is crashed. Crash the network of your local 911 and see how many people die because the operator isn't able to find the address of a heart patient who can't speak well enough during the attack to give thier address.

We've become very dependant on computers and networking. Sometimes, very critical systems are left wide open. I think that having them tested for security leaks is a good idea.

A friend of mine who is a consultant did a 26 page report on a small town police department's network, finding that he was able to access everthing on thier network, including personal and critical information from home, with out a user account on the network.

Slashdot has caught the political meme

[Anonymous Coward]

There used to be a time when you could comment on such articles without it being turned into a political diatribe. This article is damn interesting and there could be some awesome commentary by some /.'ers. However you political numbnuts decided to turn this into soapbox rant afternoon.

BTW, I am left-leaning as well, but for fucks sake keep your politics to yourself. It's completely off-topic yet gets modded up becuase of /. groupthink. Leave your political rants for the /. political threads.

Cmon guys don't drag this place down a notch. It's annoying to sort through at +4/5 expecting cool comments but all you get is some guys off topic political rant that fits the /. atmosphere.