Is the Cyberterror Threat Credible?

Scott Pinzon writes "Is the idea that cyber terrorists might take down US networks or utilities realistic, or over-hyped? One of the authors of the Patriot Act and several Black Hat 2005 speakers debated the issue informally at WatchGuard's "Security and Beer Roundtable." Participants include Dan Kaminsky, Johnny "Google Hacker" Long, Tim Mullen, Sensepost penetration testers, a guy from Microsoft's ISA team, and others."

Comments

Realistic, I'd say.

[alphafoo]

I don't know about a cyberterrorist, per se, but there sure are a lot of compromised machines out there. Anyone remember the article that quoted an estimated 200,000 zombies added every day?

Alan Cox said it best in this interview http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/09/12 /alan-cox.html:
"We are still in a world where an attack like the slammer worm combined with a PC BIOS eraser or disk locking tool could wipe out half the PCs exposed to the internet in a few hours."

SIPRNet

[GileadGreene]

With the resources available to the government, would an alternative "G-Internet" have been infeasible?

The DOD already operates a separate internet for classified material. It's known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. So yes, an alternative "G-Internet" is more than feasible - it already exists.

Re:Are critical systems on the internet?

[BoneFlower]

The internet is fairly redundant, and would probably take a ridiculously large attack to completely destroy.

But taking out things like root servers and some major routers, and its efficiency will go down the tubes. Do you recall what the internet was like after 9/11? A lot of major sites were fubared, I had trouble with some emails... it was a pain. A lot of intenet traffic goes throught NYC.