Reno calls for help in battling cybercrime

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http://www.techserver.com/noframes/story/0,2294,500218557-500310972-501732187-0,00.html

By JAMES ROSEN, Nando Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (June 20, 2000 2:03 a.m. EDT http://www.nandotimes.com) -
Attorney General Janet Reno warned Monday that computer hacking and
other proliferating forms of online mischief are confronting
law-enforcement agencies with fresh challenges, but she said the
government alone cannot solve the problem.

Two-thirds of Americans feel threatened by cybercrime and 62 percent
do not believe enough is being done to protect Internet users,
according to a poll by the Information Technology Association of
America, a Washington lobby of 11,000 high-tech businesses.

"Even in the Internet's relatively short existence, we have seen a
dizzying array of criminal use of the technology," Reno told a
"cybercrime summit" of executives from information-technology
companies and law-enforcement officials from around the country.

The crimes, she said, range from transmission of software viruses over
the Internet - such as the "I Love You" bug that brought some of the
nation's business to halt in early May - to cyberstalking, digital
trafficking in child pornography, distribution of stolen credit-card
numbers and attacks on government and commercial Web sites.

Much of the crime, Reno said, should be fought through better
cybersecurity policies and practices by private businesses and through
public education, not through tougher government regulation and
law-enforcement.

"We have to make sure that we join together while people are learning
about the Net," she said. "It's an unusual time in history, where we
can shape the whole public attitude of what's right and what's not
right."

Reno also warned, though, that Americans are newly vulnerable to
cyberattack from foreign enemies because of our increasing reliance on
computer networks to store and transmit information.

"We are very dependent on cybertechnology," she said. "We have not
kept up with cybersecurity. So much of this nation's critical
infrastructure ... is dependent on what you have created. Being
dependent, it is also at risk of cyberterrorism."

Richard Clarke, the White House national coordinator for security and
infrastructure protection, said several hostile foreign countries have
formed "information warfare" units and are actively using electronic
espionage to find digital vulnerabilities in the United States. Those
nations, Clarke said, are not focusing on traditional military targets
but rather on critical components of the civilian economy such as
banks, electric power banks and traffic control centers.

"It's the first time in our history where our armed forces cannot
defend us from potential military threat," Clarke said.

The Pentagon set up a new cyberwarfare center last fall to protect the
United States against hackers and devise means of attacking enemies'
computer networks. In February, President Clinton hosted a
cybersecurity meeting of senior government officials and leaders of
Internet and technology firms at the White House.

In his budget proposal for the 2000-01 fiscal year, which begins Oct.
1, Clinton has asked Congress to spend $2 billion on cybersecurity.
His plan includes $606 million on federal research and development,
$50 million to create an Institute for Information Infrastructure
Protection and $25 million for an ROTC-like program to train young
people in computer security.

Several widely publicized incidents of digital crime appear to have
increased Americans' awareness of the threat. Transmission of the "I
Love You" virus through e-mail messages created havoc across the
country last month, causing nearly $1 billion in damage and computer
upgrades, while the "Melissa" virus disabled computer networks on
March 26, 1999.

Hundreds of web sites were temporarily paralyzed in February by
cybercriminals who overloaded their systems with tens of thousands of
e-mail messages. And hackers invaded web sites of the U.S. Senate, the
FBI, the Army, the White House and several Cabinet agencies in a
digital joy ride last summer.

One of the country's most notorious hackers, a former Raleigh, N.C.,
resident named Kevin Mitnick, was convicted of committing 25 felonies
last year after a decade-long series of assaults on government and
private computer databases.

To combat such misdeeds, the FBI has created a dozen computer crime
units around the country. The agency is pursuing more than 1,000
cybercrime cases, five times the number in 1997.

In a survey last month by the FBI and the San Francisco-based Computer
Security Institute, 70 percent of businesses and government agencies
said there had been unauthorized use of their computer systems in the
last year - up from 42 percent in 1996.

In the new poll of 1,000 Americans, conducted June 8-11 by Fabrizio
McLaughlin & Associates of Alexandria, Va., 65 percent of those
surveyed said there is a smaller chance of apprehending cybercriminals
than perpetrators of other crimes.

Forty-five percent of Americans believe that businesses will devise
better ways of protecting their computer networks, while an equal
number think cybercrime will become worse in the future.

Information-technology firms generated $524 billion in revenue last
year, while Americans spent $171.4 billion in online commerce. Harris
Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of
America, said the industry must make it safer to use computers.

"The new economy cannot operate like the Wild West," he said.

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