RSSStudy: US Not Prepared for Net Attacks
By Ed Oswald | Published June 23, 2006, 1:06 PM
If the United States were to suffer from a catastrophic Internet disruption, it is likely that there would be a significant impact to both homeland and economic security. A report issued by the Business Roundtable Friday claims that the country is ill prepared for such an event.
The Business Roundtable is made of 160 CEOs from America's largest companies. The group says that there is too much ambiguity in what the response would be from both the public and private sectors.
"If there's a cyber disaster, there is no emergency number to call - and no one in place to respond because our nation simply doesn't have the kind of coordinated plan in place that we need to restart and restore the Internet," State Farm chairman and CEO Edward Rust said.
Rust also chairs the Roundtable's cyber security working group. He argued it was essential that a plan be devised to deal with such an event. Many of the problems that were uncovered looked similar those found with the disaster response to Hurricane Katrina.
First, there is no early warning system to monitor cyber attacks and whether or not they are spreading rapidly. Additionally, public and private sectors that would oversee any recovery have either unclear or overlapping responsibilities, which could slow down the effort considerably.
Finally, there are insufficient resources and support to make a recovery possibly. The Roundtable found that the National Cyber Security Division, a government entity, has little funding that is earmarked for recovery from cyber attacks.
With these problems, a large part of the Internet could be disrupted, whether it be a major attack, software problem, or even a natural disaster, the group concluded.
"If our nation is hit by a cyber Katrina that wipes out large parts of the Internet, there is no coordinated plan in place to restart and restore the Internet," said John J. Castellani, President of the Roundtable. Castellani noted that copies of the report have been sent to both Congress and the Department of Homeland Security.
Recommendations to improve on planning include leadership from the technology industry itself in rebuilding damaged infrastructure as soon as possible. Federal government must also take a clearer role in assigning responsibilities, as well as providing the necessary funding.
In the private sector, the group recommended companies appoint a person to serve as the head of the recovery efforts, and make plans for how a disruption would be handled.
In the end, the group said the best thing would be for the private and public sectors to work together on plans as much as possible. "We need a national response to this challenge, not separate business and government responses - and that means better collaboration," Castellani said.
"Because of the widespread consequences of a massive cyber disruption, our nation cannot wait until an incident occurs to start planning the response," he warned.
im more than willing to bet that, the whole nerd population deprived of fresh porn, would suffer a suicide rate of 1 out of 2, that is after exhausting their cached 200 gigs of porn in a matter of minutes after realizing the net was down.
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|NO PROBLEM!
The NSA has a backup copy of everything. *laughs
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|Well, Between the NSA and Google....
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|Yeah, this is amusing stuff...
...But have we all forgotten the Level3 / Cogent de-peering that effectively cut the Internet (at least in the US) in half?
(Level 3 Network Falters Overnight )
http://www.betanews.com/...rs_Overnight/1129915712
(ISP Dispute Over - For Now)
http://www.betanews.com/...Over_For_Now/1128703803
(Level 3, Cogent Agree on Traffic Deal)
http://www.betanews.com/...Traffic_Deal/1130515703
Seeing only an utter lack of possibilities sheds light on one's own lack of creativity. Of course the internet can be widely disrupted. The less creative of us just haven't figured out *how* yet.
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|I think it would most likely hurt the porn industry the most. It would mean going back to those seedy bookshops.
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|I think it would most likely hurt the porn industry the most. It would mean going back to those seedy bookshops.
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|"If there's a cyber disaster, there is no emergency number to call - and no one in place to respond because our nation simply doesn't have the kind of coordinated plan in place that we need to restart and restore the Internet,"
Hey A$$holes, keep that sort of $hit out of the news, stop giving the terrorists new ideas.
MIT enrollment just went up 1500% all radical Muslim extremist;-) lol
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|Yeah, this is also the topic of another discussion, Media and responsibility. A couple years ago they were transmitting troop movements over the news and schedules for bombing raids and giving away their positions..
Hell I would shoot the media myself if I caught them doing something so stupid.
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|US not prepared? The US OWNS the internet basicly. So I guess no country is ready, why is it just the US? And btw.. WHO CARES...
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|My sentiments exactly.
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|very true
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|OH,NO! That would be horrid. The people might wake up and find out that they have families and yards. OMG NO! Someone might get out of a chair for a few minutes and have to talk to someone in RL. This must not happen! A few companies will have to do business face to face again. God forbid.
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|Wait wait wait.. stop. You are telling me, there is a world away from my screen? I thought that WAS the world?
Why the hell didn't anyone tell me this sooner? Hmm.. how long has the world been up? Does it require a reboot too, because I don't have an interface for world 1.0...
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|Internet? WTF is the internet?
Time to add more hickory to the fire. heh
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|Hardware: Earth
Uptime: 3.9 Million Years.
...Beat that.
Got a minor virus problem though. Darn "Human" things growing like SPAM. Can't filter 'em either. Tried flushing the cache ~2000 cycles ago...didn't work.
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|OK, I am going to claim BS on this.
I am not even going to entertain ANY semblance of threat via Internet where the USA is concerned. The internet is a HUGE network of billions of computers (and I don't think that number is far off). There is no way, on this green earth that you can attack enough machines in this country to disrupt the Internet.. Sorry, don't believe it.
Besides, who can pull this off? You would have to have such great cooperation of so many people at so many levels of ISP, that SOEMEONE would leak it before it got started.. Sorry, don't believe it. No way. No how.
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|A successful attack on the root DNS servers could do such at thing.
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|No it can't. That just takes out the look up servers, its the equivalent of removing phone books from the city. You can STILL make phone calls! Just because the Directory is gone, doesn't stop traffic.
If you are going to come up with viable reasons, at least have the decency to UNDERSTAND technology.
Domain NAMING Service is a SMALL part of the Internet, it doesnt' drive it. Besides, DNS servers are ALSO replicated ALL over the world, so where is the root of these servers, hmmmm?
Yeah, this post tells me you know ZIP about how the internet works.
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|That's what name server cache is for, IE: ttl on your DNS queries.
DDOSing the name servers would hurt "the internet" when looking up uncached addresses, but it wouldn't take it down.
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|I love how everyone wants to plan on the "what-ifs".
Get bent. Live life. Don't rely on technology so darn much.
It's common sense folks. Forget warning people, let natural selection take it's course.
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|This is why I'm hanging onto my FREE 1500 HOURS OF AOL CD...
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|ROTFLMAO
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|I stockpiled them. Yep, last weekend I cleaned out the ole nuclear fallout bunker that still had beans, rice and water from the Y2K scare and filled it with Free AOL CD's and spare 56K Modems. No! I will not tell you where its at! ;-)
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|Just get Hughsnet. As long as you have a view of the northern/southern..whatever sky you get fast internet. And i'll be DAMNED if the terrorist will attack a hughsnet sattelite. I don't think their AK-47's or short ranged shoddy rocket launchers can reach that high.
Also, I want to say i'm kidding. And...I want to shoot that friggin' red headed chick that sells that crap. My dream is to one day pwn her at Halo 2 because her connection dropped due to some cloud cover or solar radiation.
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