Cyber Terrorism is Real

There were financial analysts who foresaw the financial meltdown. They got ignored. Economy floundered.

Same is happening for cyberterrorism meltdown today. Biggest names in FBI, GCHQ (U.K's intelligence agency) and a whole array of security experts from the private sector all sounding the alarm.

What Security Experts Are Saying:

"I don't want to speak about it. I don't even want to think about it. But we are close, very close, to cyber terrorism. Perhaps already the criminals have sold their skills to the terrorists - and then... oh, God"
said Mr. Kaspersky who is one of the biggest security experts in the world
"cyberattacks could also become a tool for terrorist groups that are determined to inflict maximum damage regardless of the price."
statement by Ambassador Gobar Iklody, NATO's assistant secretary general who heads the emerging security challenges division
"critical systems are under increasing threat from terror groups."
statement by: Shawn Henry, the FBI's executive assistant director

So what's the big deal?

Problem is that Cyber Terrorism is NOT science fiction. We have already witnessed these attacks in the past. We've seen poisoning of water sources and even an attack on a nuclear power plant! These dangers are even more true today as more and more facilities can be controlled remotely via the internet.

As a matter of fact US Department of Homeland Security has revealed that 2011 had triple the attacks of 2010 carried out against vital infrastructures like power grids and water filtration systems.

Worst of all, vulnerabilities can be discovered without insider information. Security researcher Dillon Beresford said it took him just two months and US$20,000 in equipment to find more than a dozen vulnerabilities in the same type of electronic controllers used in the nuclear power plant attacks.

An attack carried out against a power plant may force it's turbine's to rotate at excessive speeds which may cause a power failure. During the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster turbines failed and tons of radioactive material got released into the environment.

How bad is it?

The situation has become so critical that Shawn Henry, the FBI's executive assistant director, proposed we built a brand new Internet. According to him "We can't tech our way out of the cyberthreat," and "The challenge with the internet is you don't know who's launching the attack."

Take power plants and water filtration systems off the grid!

We need to completely block the Internet in all vital facilities. Hackers should have no way of accessing the internal systems remotely. Employees shouldn't watch Youtube videos while monitoring levels of chlorine in your drinking water.

As McAfee's analyst David Marcus puts it "it is really no more difficult to attack a SCADA (water filtration) network or system than it is to attack any other system."

Another hacker, Pr0f, was able to obtain internal documents from the water systems of South Houston, Texas. He said "I'm not going to expose the details of the box. No damage was done to any of the machinery; I don't really like mindless vandalism. It's stupid and silly," pr0f wrote. "On the other hand, so is connecting interfaces to your SCADA machinery to the Internet. I wouldn't even call this a hack, either, just to say. This required almost no skill and could be reproduced by a two year old with a basic knowledge of Simatic."

References: