Expect national infrastructure attack, FIRST founder warns FIRST

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Emergencyresponse teams should expect "at least one concentrated attack on acritical national infrastructure system like power or water supply",the FIRST annual conference in Baltimore, Maryland, USA was warnedtoday [Wednesday, June 28].

In his keynote address to the conference Richard Pethia, one ofFIRST’s founders, director of the Carnegie Mellon University ComputerEmergency Response Team Co-ordination Centre, said that a high-levelattack would happen "sooner or later."

He added: "I’m not saying whether or not the attack will succeed incrippling a national utility system, but I do believe it will certainlyshake it up a lot."

Mr Pethia told FIRST (the Forum of Incident Response and SecurityTeams) of a world in which cyber criminals were becoming moresophisticated and more brutal, and alluding to yesterday’s conferencetalks on closer ties with law enforcers he said: "I think it’s time forus to get seriously connected with the law enforcement community.Attacks for profit will increase dramatically, and the people concernedaren’t going to worry about causing serious injury on the way."

Meanwhile there was a shift, he said, from wide-scale indiscriminateworm and virus attacks towards more specific victim-targeting. Whateverwe did last year we’re going to have to change, because next year’sproblems will be different.

"Systems will become ever more complex, continuously evolving andbecoming bigger and more interdependent, and that means newvulnerabilities will open up."He predicted increasing dissatisfaction with perimeter security andintrusion detection systems, not least because "they don’t scale up tothe size of the systems we envisage". Instead, he foresaw the emergenceof "application-centric" security event detection.

Mr Pethia told delegates: “Some of the problems we have are rootedin system architecture and design. You people should let your voices beheard; tell the vendors: 'guys, you've got to do a better job. We needbetter systems with better security."

He added that it was important for security teams to get input tomanagement about security and training: "we all know that someorganisations are on top of security – and others are clueless."

More about the FIRST Baltimore Conference at

www.first.org/conference/2006

More about FIRST at

http://www.first.org&http://www.first.org/about

FIRST hosts a Global Security News Feed at

http://www.first.org/newsroom/globalsecurity

June 28, 2006 16:36 GMT+01

News Source : Expect national infrastructure attack, FIRST founder warns FIRST