X-force unit eyes Australia

[William Knowles <wk () C4I ORG>]

http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/breakingnews/story/0,2000011362,20106950,00.htm

By DavidHellaby
14 November 2000

Asia Pacific vice president of Internet Security Systems, Steve
Laskowski, said three Australian security specialist would operate the
X-Force unit, which will be based in Sydney.

X-Force has been involved in infiltrating hacking groups and
developing counter measures to hack attacks for several years.

It has its headquarters in Atlanta and works with organisations such
as the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Interpol to help track
down hackers and hacker groups such as Mafia Boy, who shut down
several major Internet sites early this year, and the hackers who
infiltrated Microsoft's security last month and accessed secret
programming code for future products.

X-Force is expected to develop close ties with the Queensland-based
Australian Computer Emergency Response Team (AusCERT), which acts as
an early warning system to its members about security flaws and
potential hacker threats.

One of X-Force's key roles is to find security vulnerabilities in
software before hackers do.

Mr Laskowski said the Australian X-Force members would be looking for
'exploits' with e-business applications, databases and operating
systems.

They also will be expected to keep a close watch on the 'hacker
underground' and provide early warning of the development of new
hacker tools or viruses.

Last year, X-Force employed a former member of New Zealand military
intelligence, who is now running a division in the United States.

Mr Laskowski said the three major threats to any business that used
the Internet were next generation denial of service attacks, Trojans
and the severe shortage of trained IT security professional.

Denial of service attacks involve hackers shutting down networks by
overloading them with massive amount of junk data.

There is still no way of stopping such attacks, he said, and they can
cause millions of dollars worth of damage.

Trojans are programs secretly embedded in other programs or
applications such as email messages that when activated can do a
variety of things ranging from destroying data to stealing passwords
and providing hackers with access to computer systems, which they can
then take control of.

Mr Laskowski said the shortage of trained security professionals was
very worrying. He said Queensland was one of the few Australian states
that trained security experts but it had trouble keeping them because
they could make huge money overseas.


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