Hand-to-Keyboard Combat

The official Web site of the Georgian government was defaced last August:  Courtesy Shadowserver Foundation

André M. DiMino, the co-founder and director of the Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit group of volunteer security professionals who identified the server at the heart of the Georgia attacks, calls the new agency "a step in the right direction." He says the government should initiate a standard way to handle attacks and respond faster to increasingly sophisticated hacker tools. As an example, he points to the use of a recently developed technique called Fast Flux in which hijacked computers, called zombies, set up a shell game of constantly changing fake IP addresses. Using this method, an attack can come from one source and then another just a few minutes later, making them hard to block and trace.

While Beckstrom and his team are forging a unified front against cyber- terrorism, other arms of the CNCI will work toward reducing the number of federal Internet portals from an estimated 4,000 to fewer than 100, expanding a cyber-emergency-readiness team, creating a secure operating system for government computers, and developing a computer-monitoring system designed to look for security lapses.

DiMino applauds such efforts but hopes for more. "There's always room for improvement," he says.