Why it's So Difficult to Trace Cyber-Attacks
Cyber attacks may not be a new phenomenon but the recent successes scored against high-profile targets including CitiGroup, Google, RSA and government contractors such as Lockheed Martin underscore the targets' current failure to block security threats enabled by the Internet. Malicious hackers use the very same technology that enables online banking, entertainment and myriad other communication services to attack these very applications, steal user data, and then cover their own tracks.
One common practice that attackers employ to evade detection is to break into poorly secured computers and use those hijacked systems as proxies through which they can launch and route attacks worldwide. Although such attacks are an international problem, there is no international response, which frustrates local law enforcement seeking cooperation from countries where these proxy servers typically reside.
Every day seems to bring news of some new cyber attack. "We're seeing more reports on invasive attacks on a much more regular basis," says Chris Bronk, an information technology policy research fellow at Rice University's James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy and a former U.S. State Department diplomat. The hardest problem in finding the source of these attacks is attribution. Each data packet sent over the Internet contains information about its source and its destination. "The source field can be changed [spoofed] by an attacker to make it seem like it's coming from someplace it's not," says Sami Saydjari, president of the cyber-security consultancy Cyber Defense Agency and a former program manager of information assurance at the Defense Advanced Projects Agency (DARPA).
