An employee of Korea Internet Security Center works at a monitoring room in Seoul, South Korea, Wednesday, July 8, 2009. South Korean intelligence authorities believe that North Korea or pro-Pyongyang forces in South Korea committed cyber attacks that paralyzed major South Korean and U.S. Web sites, an official said Wednesday. (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)From The Washington Times:
Inability of agencies to prevent it 'pathetic'.
A leading authority on cyberwarfare says the Independence Day attack that knocked some U.S. government Web sites offline was so primitive it could be compared to a modern air force using hot-air balloons instead of planes to attack a foe.
"We should have been able to shrug it off," James Lewis, project director of the independent blue-ribbon Commission on Cyber Security for the 44th Presidency told The Washington Times. "The physical equivalent of this would have been an attack using hot-air balloons."
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My Comment: The key phrase in this story is the following ....
Inability of agencies to prevent it 'pathetic'.
If our agencies cannot prevent a "very minor" attack .... what happens if we have a major attack? I guess we all know the answer.
2 comments:
The failure to prevent the DDoS attacks by some agencies was pathetic, but I'm confident in the cyber security of our nation in the event of a "major" attack.
And this was truly a "minor" attack! DDoS attacks took the public websites of the FBI and WTO down for a few hours, but that isn't a big deal; there is no lasting damage and security hasn't been breached. Those sites are very easy and very visible targets, and they are merely informational resources for curious citizens or potential employees. They are non-essential and aren't highly defended.
I'm a federal computer technician employee, and all of the personnel systems that I've encountered are locked down tight and immune to both "minor" and "major" attacks. However, the FBI and WTO public sites don't contain critical information, and they aren't a high priority to protect.
The attacks were like a child with a butter knife who cut down a few blades of grass. The forest of great oak trees still stands.
To Mr. Huck:
Thank you for your comment, which I am in agreement with. But my focus is not on what happened last week, today, or even next month. My concerns are for next year (and after that) as other countries start to understand the importance of the web to our infrastructure and military.
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