http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0501/051501td.htm By Liza Porteus National Journal's Technology Daily May 15, 2001 The massive Y2K efforts exerted to prevent a crash of the nation's critical infrastructure may have moved the nation into the new millennium with a few battle scars, a panel of experts said Monday, but officials should heed the lessons learned from that experience when looking toward protecting the nation's technological backbone in the future. Cyberterrorism "has no deadline like the 31st of December. It's going to go on forever," Utah Republican Sen. Robert Bennett said at an Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) conference on Monday. "We have this kind of vulnerability now that we never had before." Bennett said the government is far from ready to combat cyberterrorism, noting that in the past 12 months alone, government agencies reported 586 intrusions. Bennett added that his own Senate Web site was defaced over the weekend when an aide in his office opened an attachment that spread porn to Bennett's Web site and to all addresses in the aide's e-mail account--some of which included Utah schools. "The time is coming, and coming rapidly, when these intrusions will become more than a nuisance, more than embarrassing." He said countries or individuals with vendettas against the United States could do the most damage to the nation via the banking industry. "That would devastate the United States more than a nuclear device let off over a major city," he said. Virginia Technology Secretary Donald Upson, who has been mentioned as a potential candidate for a key technology job in the Bush administration, and John Sopko, deputy administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), both hailed recent initiatives by President Bush to streamline efforts to protect critical infrastructure as a way to bring industry and government together. Upson said critical infrastructure protection needs to begin at the top level, but "it hasn't happened yet. ... We don't know today what the federal government's role is. ... Our challenge is figuring out how to work together." But Sopko said that "one has to recognize cyberdefense is a long-term problem with several pitfalls along the way." He said Commerce Secretary Donald Evans has made promoting and protecting e-government a priority because "our opponents are smarter and our dependence [on e-commerce] is greater." Sopko said the Bush administration has approached the challenge with "eagerness and receptivity." He said e-government is one of the administration's "core security issues." The White House announced last week that a review of critical infrastructure policy would be conducted with industry input, with the results to be released later this year. Evans, meanwhile, told a Senate Appropriations subcommittee last week that the administration has made a "real effort" to work with industry. "We're not trying to worry about whose turf it's on. ... We're trying to figure out solutions," he said. "That's what it's all about." ISN is hosted by SecurityFocus.com --- To unsubscribe email isn-unsubscribeat_private
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