Hunting Phantoms

[InfoSec News <isn () C4I ORG>]

Forwarded by: Bronc Buster <bronc () attrition org>

http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,16974,00.html

Hunting Phantoms

Millions of tax dollars are spent each year to combat cyberterrorism.
But where are the perpetrators?

By Erik Ginorio

On Feb. 4, 1999, FBI director Louis Freeh went before the Senate
Appropriations Committee's Subcommittee on the Departments of
Commerce, Justice and State, and testified that since the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing "no significant act of foreign-directed terrorism
has occurred on American soil.

"The frequency of terrorist incidents in the United States has
decreased in number," claimed Freeh. In fact, Freeh stated, the main
threat of terrorist activity is abortion-clinic bombings and
right-wing militias who may gain access to weapons of mass
destruction.

Not once in his testimony did Freeh mention any specific
cyber-terrorism threat, planned or carried out.

Freeh then asked for $36.7 million for the Technology and Cyber Crimes
initiative, and another $13 million for the National Infrastructure
Protection Center, or NIPC. How come?

For that matter, what happened to the "electronic Pearl Harbor" that
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.) promised us in 1999, when he said it was not
a matter of if but when we would be the targets of massive
Internet-based attacks? Or the "foreign infiltrators" into U.S. Y2K
projects that NIPC head Michael Vatis warned of in 1999? These
potential cyber terrorists, Vatis claimed, would place dangerous
Trojan horses and malicious code into the systems they were hired to
fix. The infrastructure of the United States, he warned, could be at
risk.


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