The US federal government wants to build a system to detect Internet attacks before they occur.
Cyber attacks can't be prevented or protected by the government alone, Chertoff said. The homeland security chief is calling on Silicon Valley to send some of its best to Washington to work on the effort on protecting the Internet from terrorist hijacking.
By Jerry Carter
Apr 10, 2008 01:16 AM GMT
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff described chilling scenarious at the RSA Conference, a group of cyber security specialists, in San Francisco Tuesday. Chertoff demonstrated that through the Internet, terrorists and criminals can do the kind of damage they could never do on their own. He cited the massive denial-of-service attack launched against the Estonian government computers last year. "Imagine what would happen if a sophisticated attack on our financial systems caused them to be paralyzed. It would be a shaking of the foundation of trust on which commercial intercourse depends," Chertoff said. The sophisticated attack, ran by a remote-controlled " botnet", shut down the Estonian's financial system as well as media and police Web sites. More than a million computer systems were hit, as Estonian government sites that normally received a thousand visitors a day were swamped by up to 2,000 visits a second.
Cyber attacks can't be prevented or protected by the government alone, he said. The homeland security chief is calling on Silicon Valley to send some of its best to Washington to work on the effort on protecting the Internet from terrorist hijacking.The US federal government wants to build a system to detect Internet attacks before they occur, a new initiative that the Homeland Security Department launched in January. President Bush has approved the effort which is a plan to protect the federal domain from attacks. Chertoff described the new plan as being similar to the Manhattan Project, the government program that developed the atomic bomb. The Security chief also said the private sector also needs to get involved in defending against attacks, since failure of systems can have cascading effects across our nation.
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