State of Alert Evident At CyberCrime Session

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

http://www.newsday.com/business/printedition/ny-bzcybe113126129feb11,0,178262.story?coll=ny-business-print

By Mark Harrington
STAFF CORRESPONDENT
February 11, 2003

Mashantucket, Conn. - Robert Weaver was barking about the need for
increased cooperation between business and law enforcement to choke
cyberterrorism when a Connecticut state trooper with a bomb-sniffing
dog entered the conference room and walked its perimeter.

"Anything we need to know about?" asked Weaver, special agent in
charge at the U.S. Secret Service's New York crimes electronic task
force. The trooper shook his head, finished his rounds and left.

Reminders about the heightened state of alert - officially orange -
were everywhere yesterday at the annual CyberCrime 2003 conference.  
Each year hundreds of government computer specialists descend on this
northern Connecticut gaming town to talk about everything from
tracking down hackers to computer forensics.

It was evident from the moment the conference began, when attendees
were told Sunday's two high-level keynote speakers couldn't attend
because of heightened security concerns in Washington and New York.

One of them, Jerome Hauer, director of the office of public health
preparedness at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
didn't help matters when he shared the latest intelligence via
speakerphone. "We've been round the clock here since Thursday," he
said. "Intelligence continues to tell us we continue to see an
imminent threat to the U.S. These groups are not happy with our
potential interest in [war with] Iraq ... Their philosophy is to kill
as many of us as they can."

Intelligence from Algerian nationals in Britain indicated Al-Qaida
remains "very interested" in poisons, chemical agents and nerve agents
and there are concerns about the potential use of a "large explosive
device," Hauer said.

More on point for the somber techies, however, was the expectation
that a computer-based attack likely would play a role in the war.  
Hauer said the government has taken note of the computer war that has
raged between the Palestinians and Israelis. "The Palestinians tried
to do everything they could to undermine Israeli computers," he said,
noting the Israelis countered by electronically spreading
disinformation about its operations. He expects much of the same in
this country. Terrorists are "very interested in getting into our
computers to cause economic disruption."

Not surprisingly, the techniques for intrusion are more powerful, more
widespread and more insidious than ever.

Jonathan Rusch, special counsel for fraud prevention at the U.S.  
Department of Justice, said electronic thieves have gone multimedia,
devising schemes that involve use of several complementary
technologies.

In one such case prosecuted last year, two Russian hackers armed with
a database of 50,000 credit card users wrote software that created new
e-mail addresses for a battalion of bidders and sellers, who were then
programmed to conduct tens of thousands of bogus transactions on a
popular auction site.

Payments using the stolen credit card numbers were transferred to an
online payment site, where the thieves collected the booty.

On an optimistic note, law enforcement is getting smarter about
tracking, prosecuting and sometimes even preventing online treachery.

Lisa Friel, chief of the sex crimes prosecution unit at the Manhattan
District Attorney's office, recounted an early misstep in prosecuting
Internet-related crime. Police arrested a man accused of raping a
woman he'd enticed to New York through an e-mail correspondence. The
arrest was made without securing or even observing the e-mail
messages, which later revealed that the woman hadn't been truthful.

Now, Friel said, police and prosecutors know the importance of seizing
and securing evidence on hard drives early on, how to garner evidence
from Internet service providers and how not to tip off a potential
offender to the presence of an investigation.



-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomo () attrition org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.