FBI hacker sleuths hint at power-grid disaster

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/15538.html

By: Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted: 17/12/2000 at 05:17 GMT

The FBI's Chicken-Little-esque anti-hacking outfit, the National
Infrastructure Protection Centre (NIPC), raised the alarm last week
over an amusing FTP stuff-up enabling a group of kids to play
interactive games courtesy of a power-utility's bandwidth.

The network in question was stupidly configured for anonymous FTP
login with read and write privileges, pretty much a welcome mat for
anyone in cyberspace to post and retrieve files as they please.
Naturally some kids set up a game, with which they managed to gobble
up most of the network bandwidth.

The incident occurred because hopelessly incompetent network
administrators essentially left the door open, the lights on and set
out milk and cookies for their anonymous guests. Technically speaking,
they left the writable FTP directory and sub-directories owned by the
FTP account rather than by root, which would have reserved write
privileges to the network admins.

But to hear NIPC tell it, a band of terrorists kept all of Western
civilisation hanging by a slender thread:

"A regional entity in the electric power industry has recently
experienced computer intrusions through anonymous FTP (File Transfer
Protocol) login exploitation," the organisation says ominously.

"The intruders used the hacked FTP site to store and play interactive
games that consumed 95 per cent of the organization's Internet
bandwidth." (our emphasis)

"Hacked" it most certainly was not. Trespassing is about the worst
offence one could claim here; but with no access control whatsoever in
place, there isn't, therefore, any digital "NO Trespassing" sign in
evidence, and one might argue that he had no reason to believe that
the owner didn't intend to make his FTP account available for public
use.

In a lame effort to make the mildly comical sound potentially
catastrophic, NIPC hastened to add that "the compromised bandwidth
threatened the regional entity's ability to conduct bulk power
transactions."

Apparently, the manager of the exploited utility was for some
mysterious reason unable to ring up the manager(s) of his frequent
customers and suppliers and transact business over the phone. Perhaps
it wouldn't be a bad idea for these clowns to look into a 'plan-B'
along those lines.

Still trying to make the intruders look like terrorists, NIPC goes on
to speculate that they "apparently created an automated exploit that
finds a system offering FTP services and an anonymous login, and then
examines the entire system tree structure looking for any directory
with write privileges."

Nice try, but this is about as 'invasive' as scanning for proxies. And
that, according to a recent decision by the US District Court in
Georgia, is not a crime. Throughput and port scans, even in view of
the imperceptible slowdown they theoretically cause, do not damage
networks in any way, the Court ruled.

We don't think scanning for writable FTP directories would qualify as
damage either. So nuts to the NIPC on that one.

The wording of the NIPC advisory is so pumped-up with flatulence that
it testifies to the sort of cybercrime-busting dreams of empire in
which Centre Director Michael Vatis has long indulged himself.

Vatis, one might recall, is the articulate Fed who spent most of last
year blowing horns and banging cymbals warning about the "electronic
Pearl Harbour" which the Y2K Millennium Bug was supposed to make
inevitable, and thereby establishing his crew's indispensability to
the forces of righteousness.

Janet Reno's US Department of Justice (DoJ) even went so far as to
streamline warrant procedures under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA), in anticipation of digital mayhem and chaos
which of course never materialised.

What we have now is another example of what we've long suspected: that
Vatis will jump at anything to spread his gospel and justify his
budget. And when we see him jump at a group of kids enjoying a prank,
we also know he'll stop at nothing.

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