In
the time it takes to read or listen to this sentence, more than 6,000 cyber
attacks will be launched by terrorists and foreign countries against the U.S.
government and American businesses. These attacks can be divided into three
types:
- Cyber warfare
- Cyber espionage
- Cyber terrorism
Let’s
explore each of these threats.
Cyber
warfare is an attack on
one government by another government or large groups of individuals. In 2008,
U.S. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell revealed in The New
Yorker1magazine that the Defense Department detects 3 million
unauthorized probes of its computer networks every day. The same article
reported that China has 40,000 hackers gathering U.S. intelligence from our
computer networks.
An
example of cyber warfare2 was the massive assault on Estonia’s computer systems after the government
decided to move a monument of a soldier dating from the Soviet era. Estonia’s
Russian citizens, and apparently the Russian government, were opposed to the
move. On April 26, 2006, and for several days afterward, 1 million “zombie”
computers bombarded government Web sites in Estonia with data so rapidly that
the servers couldn’t keep up. The sites affected included those of the
country’s president, prime minister, and parliament, where the deluge of data
shut down the e-mail system.
What
makes cyber warfare attacks so effective is the ability to unleash an
overpowering attack by using a botnet, which is a network of computers that
have been commandeered through a software program that allows them to be
controlled remotely by a single computer.
According
to James Jay Carafano, PhD,3 a Heritage Institute senior research fellow for national security and homeland
security, many people unknowingly allow their computers to be taken over by
clicking on pop-ups, and many others do nothing more than open a Web browser
that has been compromised so that it stealthily downloads malicious code onto
the user’s hard drive.
The
end result is an army of machines that can be programmed by a spy or
terrorist. By directing thousands of...
