Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 16, 1998
Bill Gertz
Computer hackers could disable military; System compromised in secret
exercise
Senior Pentagon leaders were stunned by a military exercise showing how
easy it is for hackers to cripple U.S. military and civilian computer
networks, according to new details of the secret exercise.
Using software obtained easily from hacker sites on the Internet, a group
of National Security Agency officials could have shut down the U.S.
electric-power grid within days and rendered impotent the
command-and-control elements of the U.S. Pacific Command, said officials
familiar with the war game, known as Eligible Receiver.
"The attack was actually run in a two-week period and the results were
frightening," said a defense official involved in the game. "This attack,
run by a set of people using standard Internet techniques, would have
basically shut down the command-and-control capability in the Pacific
theater for some considerable period of time."
Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said, "Eligible Receiver was an important
and revealing exercise that taught us that we must be better organized to
deal with potential attacks against our computer systems and information
infrastructure."
The secret exercise began last June after months of preparation by the NSA
computer specialists who, without warning, targeted computers used by U.S.
military forces in the Pacific and in the United States.
The game was simple: Conduct information warfare attacks, or "infowar," on
the Pacific Command and ultimately force the United States to soften its
policies toward the crumbling communist regime in Pyongyang. The "hackers"
posed as paid surrogates for North Korea.
The NSA "Red Team" of make-believe hackers showed how easy it is for
foreign nations to wreak electronic havoc using computers, modems and
software technology widely available on the darker regions of the
Internet: network-scanning software, intrusion tools and password-breaking
"log-in scripts."
According to U.S. officials who took part in the exercise, within days the
team of 50 to 75 NSA officials had inflicted crippling damage.
They broke into computer networks and gained access to the systems that
control the electrical power grid for the entire country. If they had
wanted to, the hackers could have disabled the grid, leaving the United
States in the dark.
Groups of NSA hackers based in Hawaii and other parts of the United States
floated effortlessly through global cyberspace, breaking into unclassified
military computer networks in Hawaii, the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific
Command, as well as in Washington, Chicago, St. Louis and parts of
Colorado.
"The attacks were not actually run against the infrastructure components
because we don't want to do things like shut down the power grid," said a
defense official involved in the exercise. "But the referees were shown
the attacks and shown the structure of the power-grid control, and they
agreed, yeah, this attack would have shut down the power grid."
Knocking out the electrical power throughout the United States was just a
sideline for the NSA cyberwarriors. Their main target was the U.S. Pacific
Command, which is in charge of the 100,000 troops that would be called on
to deal with wars in Korea or China.
"The most telling thing for the Department of Defense, when all was said
and done, is that basically for a two-week period the command-and-control
capability in the Pacific theater would have been denied by the 'infowar'
attacks, and that was the period of the exercise," the official said.
The attackers also foiled virtually all efforts to trace them. FBI agents
joined the Pentagon in trying to find the hackers, but for the most part
they failed. Only one of the several NSA groups, a unit based in the
United States, was uncovered. The rest operated without being located or
identified.
The attackers breached the Pentagon's unclassified global computer network
using Internet service providers and dial-in connections that allowed them
to hop around the world.
"It's a very, very difficult security environment when you go through
different hosts and different countries and then pop up on the doorstep of
Keesler Air Force Base [in Mississippi], and then go from there into
Cincpac," the official said, using the acronym for the Commander in Chief,
Pacific.
The targets of the network attacks also made it easy. "They just were not
security-aware," said the official.
A second official found that many military computers used the word
"password" for their confidential access word.
-o-
Subscribe: mail majordomo@sekurity.org with "subscribe isn".
Today's ISN Sponsor: Dimensional Communications (www.dim.com)
Received on Fri Apr 17 08:39:32 1998