U.S. Wargamers Wrap Up Massive Cyberattack Drill: "We Are Not Prepared"

By Jeremy Hsu Posted 02.17.2010 at 2:00 pm 3 Comments

West Wing Situation Room Planning for a hopefully better tomorrow Christopher Morris/White House Museum

Washington insiders recently sweated out a real-time war game where a cyberattack crippled cell phone service, Internet and even electrical grids across the U.S. The unscripted, dynamic simulation allowed former White House officials and the Bipartisan Policy Center to study the problems that might arise during a real cyberattack emergency, according to Aviation Week's Ares Defense Blog.

The Policy Center's vice-president reports ""The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks."

The nightmarish scenario that unfolded represented a worst-case example. As former secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff noted, many cyberattacks can be stopped if individual cell phone or Internet users simply follow the best practices and use the right tools. Similarly, another participant pointed out that private Internet companies would not sit idly by as a virus ran amok.

A collapse of power across the U.S. also only took place when the simulation brought in factors such as high demand during the summer, a hurricane that had damaged power supply lines, and coordinated bombings that accompanied the cyberattack and subsequent failure of the Internet.

Still, the war game highlighted crucial issues about the government's own reliance upon communications that might go down during a real-life scenario. One of the biggest problems was how the President ought to respond to a situation that caused damage like warfare but lacked an immediately identifiable foreign adversary. Smaller-scale cyberattacks have already complicated real-world diplomacy, such as the alleged Chinese cyberattacks on Google and other U.S. companies.

Ares Defense Blog questioned a curious missing element from the simulation, in that there was no mention of what happened to phone or Internet service in the rest of the world. Surely a nation that decided to launch cyberattacks against the U.S. would take safeguards to protect its own crucial communication services, which would possibly help U.S. officials narrow down the list of suspects.

Another question seemed more mundane but equally important -- how would the government activate the National Guard with cell phone service down?

The Pentagon's DARPA science lab recently pushed for a "Cyber Genome Program" that could trace digital fingerprints to cyberattack culprits. But identifying whether a cyber attack came from individual civilians, shadowy hacker associations or government cyber-warriors has proven tricky in the meantime.

[via Ares Defense Blog]

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3 Comments

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jaydub

02/17/10 at 4:02 pm

I would think that a logical course of action for a governmental body would be to conduct clandestine hacks of US Govt systems would be by paying individual citizens to carry out the attack. There are many ways to do this without it tracing back to the government responsible. Seems to me like the "Cyber Genome Program" wouldnt do any good so why bother?

Instead build and probe the infrastructure in such a way that you protect the infrastructure from cyber attack.

In essense, you should be more concerned about protecting the information that trying to determine who the attacker is.

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brian144

02/17/10 at 11:02 pm

the cyber genome project, which would somehow attach identifiable tags that allow actions to be traced to the source would be quite helpful.

YES, a foreign government could pay a U.S. citizen to carry out the attacks, but we would still catch that person, and interogation could prove quite helpful. If they are the middleman in a cyber attack from a foreign nation, that is aiding an enemy AND assaulting the nation during a time of 'war'. Potentially, charges of treason could be brought up, and a large number of people would be willing to sell out a foreign government for leniency.

Though I do agree, it'd be far more effective to input safe guards, and even create government-only wirless communication. complete physical Detatchment of databases containing sensitive information should be maintained, so that redundant records cannot be tampered with.

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jaydub

02/18/10 at 2:28 pm

But you assume that the US citizen being paid by a foriegn government seeking to attack our system would actually knows that they were hired by a foriegn government. A government with a well developed intelligence agency is not stupid enough to leave a trail of evidence that leads back to them. The only country that has a truly active interest in attacking the US Govt's IS Infrastructure is China. Yes, they have dedicated hackers that are overtly attacking our networks, but I can garuntee that there are other bodies out there that are hacking our networks and havent the slightest idea that they are doing it for a foriegn military; what is more, there is no way of tracing it back to the Chinese. Eventually that trail will end with no real discernable culprit besides the US Citizen and the person(s) who hired them.

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