http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1540,2062956,00.asp
By Paul A. Strassmann
November 22, 2006
The idea that the Internet could fail never crossed my mind until Oct.
21, 2002. As acting CIO of NASA, I was informed that a computer at the
Ames Research Center in California, operating as one of 13 global
Internet domain name root-name serversthe master address controls for
the entire Internetwas rejecting incoming traffic from California to as
far west as India.
A globally coordinated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack was
aiming to overwhelm the processing capacity of each root-name server. We
had to start throttling down incoming traffic before we ceased to
function.
The attack volume did not exceed 50 to 100 megabits per second per root
server, yet the impact was devastating. Failing servers handed over
traffic to their peers. The workload on the survivors rose sharply and
led to "cascading" failures. Nine of the 13 root servers were out of
commission in a few minutes. The hidden attacker, after two hours,
retreated after gathering sufficient intelligence about the weaknesses
of our defenses.
This "information warfare" probe was the first known simultaneous attack
on every root server.
The incoming flood of messages was traced as coming primarily from South
Korea, but there was no way to track the perpetrators. On the Internet,
assaults can be executed by proxy machines, triggered from anywhere. At
that point, I stopped trusting the Internet as a safe information
highway.
In January 2003, my apprehensions were confirmed again when the rapidly
spreading Slammer worm started clogging the Internet. It was propagating
worldwide by capturing the operating systems on infected
computersrunning the widely used Microsoft SQL Server 2000 as well as
the Microsoft Desktop Engine 2000and turning them into "zombie"
generators of messages that replicated the worm. This worm was small,
only 376 bytes, but clever in its self-propagating habits. As traffic
surged, worms took over much of the Internet's traffic and jammed
network switches, which then re-routed transmissions to less congested
paths. In this way, the traffic queues could be built up and spread
worldwide in a few minutes so that many messages could not be delivered.
And the Slammer isn't the only attempt to damage Internet
communications; as of this writing, my library of known intruders
contains 72,838 viruses, worms and other malware.
As designed, the Internet does not ensure the integrity of the data
(e.g., e-mail messages) that traverses it. There's no way to be sure,
for example, that a service provider between point A and point B has not
tampered with data. It's also easy to disguise the source of an attack
because of the Internet's decentralized architecture.
The prospect of imposing an all-encompassing security discipline on the
global Internet is zero. The best an organization can do is carve out a
securely managed intranet, sufficiently isolated from the public
Internet with every affordable protective measure. Even then, attackers
will find ways to circumvent the defenses.
So how, then, do you figure out a return on your security investments?
While many CIOs say it is difficult to measure the value of investments
in computer security, I believe it is possible to gauge whether your
organization's approach is on target. I recommend looking at three
ratios.
The ratios are:
* Compare information security spending vs. total I.T. spending. If
security spending exceeds 10%, your business architecture is probably
poorly designed to cope with attackers.
* Examine the value of lost employee time vs. your investment in
information security. If the cost of your security investment is 200%
or more of the value of employee downtime, you may be spending too
much on security.
* Measure what impact cyberattacks are having on employee productivity.
If you are experiencing a loss of 1% or more in productivity, review
how you are protecting your information. For instance, examine the
location of your firewalls to determine whether centralization of
defensive barriers would give you greater protection.
The goal of total security is not achievable in complex systems that
have millions of hardware and software vulnerability points. The
defenders will have to monitor the frequency and losses from intrusions
to balance the costs of protection against potential damages.
Paul A. Strassmann is a former technology executive at Xerox, Nasa and
Kraft. He can be reached at paul(at)strassmann.com.
Received on Thu Nov 23 01:20:54 2006