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posted February 13, 2006 at 11:00 a.m.

'Cyberstorm' tests computer defenses

Homeland Security stages mock attacks on US computers.

By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

In the first test of its kind, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staged a mock government-led cyberattack, called Cyberstorm, to test the defenses of both government agencies and leading private sector organizations. IDG News Service, the news service of publications PCWorld, MacWorld, and InfoWorld, reports that the test was carried out in early February with the help of 115 organizations in the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. DHS called the event a "significant milestone."

A public report of the results and lessons learned will be released midyear, said Andy Purdy, acting director of the DHS National Cyber Security Division. The DHS will release the results as broadly as possible, with the exception of information deemed too sensitive, Foresman added.
"At the end of the day, we're not going to get any stronger, we're not going to get any better, unless we capture the lessons learned, share them among the broadest possible audience, and make a full commitment to pushing improvement down the road," he said.

Among the government agencies taking part were the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice, the State Department and the National Security Agency. Some of the private companies that participated in Cyberstorm were Microsoft Corp., VeriSign Inc. and Symantec Corp. GovExec.com, a news and information site for government employees, reports that Mr. Purdy said the goal of the exercise was to develop a national response system and implement it across all industry and government sectors.


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The Associated Press reports that the attack not only dealt with possible attacks by hackers, but also simulated how to deal with bloggers who were intentionally spreading misinformation about an attack.

Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.
The Internet survived, even against fictional abuses against the world's computers on a scale typical for Fox's popular "24" television series. Experts depicted hackers who shut down electricity in 10 states, failures in vital systems for online banking and retail sales, infected discs mistakenly distributed by commercial software companies and critical flaws discovered in core Internet technology.

CNet News reports that it remains unclear to what extent the exercise was proved successful in deterring cyberattacks, but most of the participants felt that the idea was to learn what needed to be done to improve responses to a real attack.

Bob Dix, an executive vice president for Dallas-based Citadel Security Systems, which participated in the simulation, said, "We won't have the results for a little while yet." But the very organization of the program, he said, symbolizes "how seriously people are taking (cybersecurity), to try and simulate a situation so that we can evaluate our preparedness and take the necessary steps ahead of time to improve on that."

CNet also reports that the exercise was one of a series of steps that DHS has taken over several months to improve its profile in this sector. Government auditors and experts in the private sector had previously criticized the agency for a poor response to the possibility of a cyberattack.

DHS has also been criticized for failing to appoint an undersecretary for cybersecurity. It is not entirely to blame for that situation however, as Congress has been slow to approve legislation that would create the position.

The Associated Press reports that an earlier test of the country's response to a cyberattack, called Live Wire, showed that the government might have trouble detecting the early stages of a cyberattacks without the help the private sector. Live Wire also raised questions about how active a role the government should take depending on who was actually doing the attacking – "terrorists, a foreign government or bored teenagers."