[ISN] Cyber-Attacks by Al Qaeda Feared

From: InfoSec News (isnat_private)
Date: Thu Jun 27 2002 - 01:05:23 PDT

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    Forwarded from: William Knowles <wkat_private>
    
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50765-2002Jun26.html
    
    By Barton Gellman
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Thursday, June 27, 2002; Page A01 
    
    Late last fall, Detective Chris Hsiung of the Mountain View, Calif.,
    police department began investigating a suspicious pattern of
    surveillance against Silicon Valley computers. From the Middle East
    and South Asia, unknown browsers were exploring the digital systems
    used to manage Bay Area utilities and government offices. Hsiung, a
    specialist in high-technology crime, alerted the FBI's San Francisco
    computer intrusion squad.
    
    Working with experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,
    the FBI traced trails of a broader reconnaissance. A forensic summary
    of the investigation, prepared in the Defense Department, said the
    bureau found "multiple casings of sites" nationwide. Routed through
    telecommunications switches in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan,
    the visitors studied emergency telephone systems, electrical
    generation and transmission, water storage and distribution, nuclear
    power plants and gas facilities.
    
    Some of the probes suggested planning for a conventional attack, U.S.  
    officials said. But others homed in on a class of digital devices that
    allow remote control of services such as fire dispatch and of
    equipment such as pipelines. More information about those devices --
    and how to program them -- turned up on al Qaeda computers seized this
    year, according to law enforcement and national security officials.
    
    Unsettling signs of al Qaeda's aims and skills in cyberspace have led
    some government experts to conclude that terrorists are at the
    threshold of using the Internet as a direct instrument of bloodshed.  
    The new threat bears little resemblance to familiar financial
    disruptions by hackers responsible for viruses and worms. It comes
    instead at the meeting points of computers and the physical structures
    they control.
    
    U.S. analysts believe that by disabling or taking command of the
    floodgates in a dam, for example, or of substations handling 300,000
    volts of electric power, an intruder could use virtual tools to
    destroy real-world lives and property. They surmise, with limited
    evidence, that al Qaeda aims to employ those techniques in synchrony
    with "kinetic weapons" such as explosives.
    
    "The event I fear most is a physical attack in conjunction with a
    successful cyber-attack on the responders' 911 system or on the power
    grid," Ronald Dick, director of the FBI's National Infrastructure
    Protection Center, told a closed gathering of corporate security
    executives hosted by Infraguard in Niagara Falls on June 12.
    
    In an interview, Dick said those additions to a conventional al Qaeda
    attack might mean that "the first responders couldn't get there . . .  
    and water didn't flow, hospitals didn't have power. Is that an
    unreasonable scenario? Not in this world. And that keeps me awake at
    night."
    
    'Bad Ones and Zeros'
    
    Regarded until recently as remote, the risks of cyber-terrorism now
    command urgent White House attention. Discovery of one acute
    vulnerability -- in a data transmission standard known as ASN.1, short
    for Abstract Syntax Notification -- rushed government experts to the
    Oval Office on Feb. 7 to brief President Bush. The security flaw,
    according to a subsequent written assessment by the FBI, could have
    been exploited to bring down telephone networks and halt "all control
    information exchanged between ground and aircraft flight control
    systems."
    
    Officials said Osama bin Laden's operatives have nothing like the
    proficiency in information war of the most sophisticated nations. But
    al Qaeda is now judged to be considerably more capable than analysts
    believed a year ago. And its intentions are unrelentingly aimed at
    inflicting catastrophic harm.
    
    One al Qaeda laptop found in Afghanistan, sources said, had made
    multiple visits to a French site run by the Societé Anonyme, or
    Anonymous Society. The site offers a two-volume online "Sabotage
    Handbook" with sections on tools of the trade, planning a hit, switch
    gear and instrumentation, anti-surveillance methods and advanced
    techniques. In Islamic chat rooms, other computers linked to al Qaeda
    had access to "cracking" tools used to search out networked computers,
    scan for security flaws and exploit them to gain entry -- or full
    command.
    
    Most significantly, perhaps, U.S. investigators have found evidence in
    the logs that mark a browser's path through the Internet that al Qaeda
    operators spent time on sites that offer software and programming
    instructions for the digital switches that run power, water, transport
    and communications grids. In some interrogations, the most recent of
    which was reported to policymakers last week, al Qaeda prisoners have
    described intentions, in general terms, to use those tools.
    
    Specialized digital devices are used by the millions as the brains of
    American "critical infrastructure" -- a term defined by federal
    directive to mean industrial sectors that are "essential to the
    minimum operations of the economy and government."
    
    The devices are called distributed control systems, or DCS, and
    supervisory control and data acquisition, or SCADA, systems. The
    simplest ones collect measurements, throw railway switches, close
    circuit-breakers or adjust valves in the pipes that carry water, oil
    and gas. More complicated versions sift incoming data, govern multiple
    devices and cover a broader area.
    
    What is new and dangerous is that most of these devices are now being
    connected to the Internet -- some of them, according to classified
    "Red Team" intrusion exercises, in ways that their owners do not
    suspect.
    
    Because the digital controls were not designed with public access in
    mind, they typically lack even rudimentary security, having fewer
    safeguards than the purchase of flowers online. Much of the technical
    information required to penetrate these systems is widely discussed in
    the public forums of the affected industries, and specialists said the
    security flaws are well known to potential attackers.
    
    Until recently, said Director John Tritak of the Commerce Department's
    Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office, many government and
    corporate officials regarded hackers mainly as a menace to their
    e-mail.
    
    "There's this view that the problems of cyberspace originate, reside
    and remain in cyberspace," Tritak said. "Bad ones and zeros hurt good
    ones and zeros, and it sort of stays there. . . . The point we're
    making is that increasingly we are relying on 21st century technology
    and information networks to run physical assets." Digital controls are
    so pervasive, he said, that terrorists might use them to cause damage
    on a scale that otherwise would "not be available except through a
    very systematic and comprehensive physical attack."
    
    'Mapping Our Vulnerabilities'
    
    The 13 agencies and offices of the U.S. intelligence community have
    not reached consensus on the scale or imminence of this threat,
    according to participants in and close observers of the discussion.  
    The Defense Department, which concentrates on information war with
    nations, is most skeptical of al Qaeda's interest and prowess in
    cyberspace.
    
    "DCS and SCADA systems might be accessible to bits and bytes,"  
    Assistant Secretary of Defense John P. Stenbit said in an interview.  
    But al Qaeda prefers simple, reliable plans and would not allow the
    success of a large-scale attack "to be dependent on some
    sophisticated, tricky cyber thing to work."
    
    "We're thinking more in physical terms -- biological agents, isotopes
    in explosions, other analogies to the fully loaded airplane," he said.  
    "That's more what I'm worried about. When I think of cyber, I think of
    it as ancillary to one of those."
    
    White House and FBI analysts, as well as officials in the Energy and
    Commerce departments with more direct responsibility for the civilian
    infrastructure, describe the threat in more robust terms.
    
    "We were underestimating the amount of attention [al Qaeda was] paying
    to the Internet," said Roger Cressey, a longtime counterterrorism
    official who became chief of staff of the President's Critical
    Infrastructure Protection Board in October. "Now we know they see it
    as a potential attack vehicle. Al Qaeda spent more time mapping our
    vulnerabilities in cyberspace than we previously thought. An attack is
    a question of when, not if."
    
    Ron Ross, who heads a new "information assurance" partnership between
    the National Security Agency and the National Institute of Standards
    and Technology, reminded the Infraguard delegates in Niagara Falls
    that, after the Sept. 11 attacks, air traffic controllers brought down
    every commercial plane in the air. "If there had been a cyber-attack
    at the same time that prevented them from doing that," he said, "the
    magnitude of the event could have been much greater."
    
    "It's not science fiction," Ross said in an interview. "A cyber-attack
    can be launched with fairly limited resources."
    
    U.S. intelligence agencies have upgraded their warnings about al
    Qaeda's use of cyberspace. Just over a year ago, a National
    Intelligence Estimate on the threat to U.S. information systems gave
    prominence to China, Russia and other nations. It judged al Qaeda
    operatives as "less developed in their network capabilities" than many
    individual hackers and "likely to pose only a limited cyber-threat,"  
    according to an authoritative description of its contents.
    
    In February, the CIA issued a revised Directorate of Intelligence
    Memorandum. According to officials who read it, the new memo said al
    Qaeda had "far more interest" in cyber-terrorism than previously
    believed and contemplated the use of hackers for hire to speed the
    acquisition of capabilities.
    
    "I don't think they are capable of bringing a major segment of this
    country to its knees using cyber-attack alone," said an official
    representing the current consensus, but "they would be able to conduct
    an integrated attack using a combination of physical and cyber
    resources and get an amplification of consequences."
    
    Counterterrorism analysts have known for years that al Qaeda prepares
    for attacks with elaborate "targeting packages" of photographs and
    notes. But, in January, U.S. forces in Kabul, Afghanistan, found
    something new.
    
    A computer seized at an al Qaeda office contained models of a dam,
    made with structural architecture and engineering software, that
    enabled the planners to simulate its catastrophic failure. Bush
    administration officials, who discussed the find, declined to say
    whether they had identified a specific dam as a target.
    
    The FBI reported that the computer had been running Microstran, an
    advanced tool for analyzing steel and concrete structures; Autocad
    2000, which manipulates technical drawings in two or three dimensions;  
    and software "used to identify and classify soils," which would assist
    in predicting the course of a wall of water surging downstream.
    
    To destroy a dam physically would require "tons of explosives,"  
    Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff said a year ago. To breach
    it from cyberspace is not out of the question. In 1998, a 12-year-old
    hacker, exploring on a lark, broke into the computer system that runs
    Arizona's Roosevelt Dam. He did not know or care, but federal
    authorities said he had complete command of the SCADA system
    controlling the dam's massive floodgates.
    
    Roosevelt Dam holds back as much as 1.5 million acre-feet of water, or
    489 trillion gallons. That volume could theoretically cover the city
    of Phoenix, down river, to a height of five feet. In practice, that
    could not happen. Before the water reached the Arizona capital, the
    rampant Salt River would spend most of itself in a flood plain
    encompassing the cities of Mesa and Tempe -- with a combined
    population of nearly a million.
    
    'Could Have Done Anything'
    
    In Queensland, Australia, on April 23, 2000, police stopped a car on
    the road to Deception Bay and found a stolen computer and radio
    transmitter inside. Using commercially available technology, Vitek
    Boden, 48, had turned his vehicle into a pirate command center for
    sewage treatment along Australia's Sunshine Coast.
    
    Boden's arrest solved a mystery that had troubled the Maroochy Shire
    wastewater system for two months. Somehow the system was leaking
    hundreds of thousands of gallons of putrid sludge into parks, rivers
    and the manicured grounds of a Hyatt Regency hotel. Janelle Bryant of
    the Australian Environmental Protection Agency said "marine life died,
    the creek water turned black and the stench was unbearable for
    residents." Until Boden's capture -- during his 46th successful
    intrusion -- the utility's managers did not know why.
    
    Specialists in cyber-terrorism have studied Boden's case because it is
    the only one known in which someone used a digital control system
    deliberately to cause harm. Details of Boden's intrusion, not
    disclosed before, show how easily Boden broke in -- and how restrained
    he was with his power.
    
    Boden had quit his job at Hunter Watertech, the supplier of Maroochy
    Shire's remote control and telemetry equipment. Evidence at his trial
    suggested that he was angling for a consulting contract to solve the
    problems he had caused.
    
    To sabotage the system, he set the software on his laptop to identify
    itself as "pumping station 4," then suppressed all alarms. Paul
    Chisholm, Hunter Watertech's chief executive, said in an interview
    last week that Boden "was the central control system" during his
    intrusions, with unlimited command of 300 SCADA nodes governing sewage
    and drinking water alike. "He could have done anything he liked to the
    fresh water," Chisholm said.
    
    Like thousands of utilities around the world, Maroochy Shire allowed
    technicians operating remotely to manipulate its digital controls.  
    Boden learned how to use those controls as an insider, but the
    software he used conforms to international standards and the manuals
    are available on the Web. He faced virtually no obstacles to breaking
    in.
    
    Nearly identical systems run oil and gas utilities and many
    manufacturing plants. But their most dangerous use is in the
    generation, transmission and distribution of electrical power, because
    electricity has no substitute and every other key infrastructure
    depends on it.
    
    Massoud Amin, a mathematician directing new security efforts in the
    industry, described the North American power grid as "the most complex
    machine ever built." At an April 2 conference hosted by the Commerce
    Department, participants said, government and industry scientists
    agreed that they have no idea how the grid would respond to a
    cyber-attack.
    
    What they do know is that "Red Teams" of mock intruders from the
    Energy Department's four national laboratories have devised what one
    government document listed as "eight scenarios for SCADA attack on an
    electrical power grid" -- and all of them work. Eighteen such
    exercises have been conducted to date against large regional
    utilities, and Richard A. Clarke, Bush's cyber-security adviser, said
    the intruders "have always, always succeeded."
    
    Joseph M. Weiss of KEMA Consulting, a leading expert in control system
    security, reported at two recent industry conferences that intruders
    were "able to assemble a detailed map" of each system and "intercepted
    and changed" SCADA commands without detection.
    
    "What the labs do is look at simple, easy things I can do to get in"  
    with tools commonly available on the Internet, Weiss said in an
    interview. "In most of these cases, they are not using anything that a
    hacker couldn't have access to."
    
    Bush has launched a top-priority research program at the Livermore,
    Sandia and Los Alamos labs to improve safeguards in the estimated 3
    million SCADA systems in use. But many of the systems rely on
    instantaneous responses and cannot tolerate authentication delays. And
    the devices deployed now lack the memory and bandwidth to use
    techniques such as "integrity checks" that are standard elsewhere.
    
    In a book-length Electricity Infrastructure Security Assessment, the
    industry concluded on Jan. 7 that "it may not be possible to provide
    sufficient security when using the Internet for power system control."  
    Power companies, it said, will probably have to build a parallel
    private network for themselves.
    
    'Where Their Crown Jewels Are'
    
    The U.S. government may never have fought a war with so little power
    in the battlefield. That became clear again on Feb. 7, when Clarke and
    his vice-chairman at the critical infrastructure board, Howard A.  
    Schmidt, arrived in the Oval Office.
    
    They told the president that researchers in Finland had identified a
    serious security hole in the Internet's standard language for routing
    data through switches. A government threat team found implications --
    for air traffic control and civilian and military phone links, among
    others -- that were more serious still.
    
    "We've got troops on the ground in Afghanistan and we've got
    communication systems that we all depend on that, at that time, were
    vulnerable," Schmidt recalled.
    
    Bush ordered the Pentagon and key federal agencies to patch their
    systems. But most of the vulnerable networks were not
    government-owned. Since Feb. 12, "those who have the fix in their
    power are in the private sector," Schmidt said. Asked about progress,
    he said: "I don't know that we'd ever get to 100 percent."
    
    Frustrated at the pace of repairs, Clarke traveled to San Jose on Feb.  
    19 and accused industry leaders of spending more on coffee than on
    information security. "You will be hacked," he told them. "What's
    more, you deserve to be hacked."
    
    Tritak, at the Commerce Department, appealed to patriotism. Speaking
    of al Qaeda, he said: "When you've got people who are saying, 'We're
    coming after your economy,' everyone has a responsibility to do their
    bit to safeguard against it."
    
    New public-private partnerships are helping, but the government case
    remains a tough sell. Alan Paller, director of research at the SANS
    Institute in Bethesda, said not even banks and brokerages, considered
    the most security-conscious businesses, tell the government when their
    systems are attacked. Sources said the government did not learn
    crucial details about September's Nimda worm, which caused an
    estimated $530 million in damage, until the stricken companies began
    firing their security executives.
    
    Experts said public companies worry about the loss of customer
    confidence and the legal liability to shareholders or security vendors
    when they report flaws.
    
    The FBI is having even less success with its "key asset initiative,"  
    an attempt to identify the most dangerous points of vulnerability in
    5,700 companies deemed essential to national security.
    
    "What we really want to drill down to, eventually, is not the
    companies but the actual things themselves, the actual switches . . .  
    that are vital to [a firm's] continued operations," Dick said. He
    acknowledged a rocky start: "For them to tell us where their crown
    jewels are is not reasonable until you've built up trust."
    
    Michehl R. Gent, president of the North American Electric Reliability
    Council, said last month it will not happen. "We're not going to build
    such a list. . . . We have no confidence that the government can keep
    that a secret."
    
    For fear of terrorist infiltration, Clarke's critical infrastructure
    board and Tom Ridge's homeland security office are now exploring
    whether private companies would consider telling the government the
    names of employees with access to sensitive sites.
    
    "Obviously, the ability to check intelligence records from the
    terrorist standpoint would be the goal," Dick said.
    
    There is no precedent for that. The FBI screens bank employees but has
    no statutory authority in other industries. Using classified
    intelligence databases, such as the Visa Viper list of suspected
    terrorists, would mean the results could not be shared with the
    employers. Bobby Gillham, manager of global security at oil giant
    Conoco Inc., said he doubts his industry will go along with that.
    
    "You have Privacy Act concerns," he said in an interview. "And just to
    get feedback that there's nothing here, or there's something here but
    we can't share it with you, doesn't do us a lot of good. Most of our
    companies would not [remove an employee] in a frivolous way, on a
    wink."
    
    Exasperated by companies seeking proof that they are targets, Clarke
    has stopped talking about threats at all.
    
    "It doesn't matter whether it's al Qaeda or a nation-state or the
    teenage kid up the street," he said. "Who does the damage to you is
    far less important than the fact that damage can be done. You've got
    to focus on your vulnerability . . . and not wait for the FBI to tell
    you that al Qaeda has you in its sights."
    
    Staff researcher Robert Thomason contributed to this report.
    
    
    
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