No cyber attacks yet, but they're coming
Security experts have been expecting a slew of hacker activity once the U.S. military retaliates for last week's terrorism, even though cyber attacks weren't launched immediately after the disaster, ZdNet eWeek reports.
According to eWeek, private security monitoring firms and the Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, the nationwide clearinghouse for data security information, in the 24 hours after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last week had no new reports on any unusual activity or security events. In fact, eWeek cites Riptech, a security intelligence service provider in Alexandria, Va as saying that the number of security incidents on Sept. 11 was about 60 percent lower than average.
"I think most of the people who normally do these kinds of malicious attacks are just as horrified as everyone else," Norm Laudermilch, Riptech's vice president of managed services told eWeek.
Security experts have told eWeek that hackers of all ideological bents will soon storm the Net, defacing Web sites or launching denial-of-service attacks to bring them down, as they have in the past after politically charged events.
"There is no doubt that we'll see big attacks coming. It's time to plan for that now," John Pescatore, Gartner's director of Internet security research told eWeek. He added, "I don't think you'll see that happening in a big way before the U.S. makes a retaliation."
Rick Fleming, who heads the security operations of Digital Defense Inc. in San Antonio, Texas told eWeek that in the discussion groups frequented by hackers, the general consensus is that some sort of electronic retaliation should occur against those responsible for the terrorism. According to eWeek, experts are expecting attacks against U.S. sites as well.
eWeek reports that last week, Taleban.com, a web site registered to the Afghan Taliban Mission to the United Nations, was commandeered by a hacker named "Ry_Den" who inserted obscene messages around a grainy photograph of Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind of the terrorist attacks. According to eWeek, Interland, the Atlanta company that provides hosting services for the web site, quickly took it down.
"For the most part, things that occur in the physical world do end up spilling over into the cyber world," Michael Cheek, director of intelligence of iDefense, a security monitoring service in Fairfax, Va told eWeek.
Back in April, after the U.S. military spy plane landed on Chinese soil, hackers in China and the U.S. were locked in a cross-nation ìcyberskirmishî. Numerous sites were defaced with anti-U.S. slogans.
eWeek goes on to report that security consultants are advising clients to be even more vigilant than usual, and even to negotiate extra protection from their ISPs or hosting companies against distributed denial-of-service attacks. Another lesson to be drawn from the terrorists' success in boarding commercial flights with weapons: Companies should evaluate their physical security measures.
"Obviously, there was some line of security penetrated [at airports], and if it was penetrated by someone on the inside, that analogy is going to resonate pretty clearly with the businesses," Chris Hopen, chief technology officer of Aventail, a Seattle managed security services provider told eWeek. "In the information security world, almost everything is an inside job."
