Summary

The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee holds a hearing on weak government computer security.

Source CONUS Archive
Record ID 343781
Story Slug SENATE HEARING / COMPUTER SECURITY (1998)
Location WASHINGTON, DC
Format TVD
Date 5/19/1998
Archive Time 15:20
TRT 5:43
Supers 1) Senator John Glenn, D-OH 2) Peter Neumann, Scientist; SRI International 3) Senator Fred Thompson, R-TN 4) “Mudge”, Computer Hacker 5) “Space Roger”, Computer Hacker
Description The Senate Governmental Affairs Committee holds a hearing on weak government computer security.
Script (SUGGESTED TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO) Unknown Speaker 00:00 If you look at this, in some ways, it's a whole new way of making warfare could be used that way. And I don't think that that overstates at one bit. What you try and do in war is bring an enemy's economy to his knees. And you if you look at what could be done right now, with some of the hackers, we've seen getting into some of the programs, they can transfer a Merrill Lynch accounts to somebody else, Chairman Thompson's many millions of dollars into the Federal Reserve and Federal Reserve back to Senator. And in addition to that, you take more seriously things like the Northeast grid, our electrical grid is controlled by computers, in probably about a half a dozen, as we had hearings, on some years ago, about a half a dozen different nodes that can control the Northeast grid, if you dump the Northeast grid all at one time by somebody hacking into it, transfer a lot of financial accounts all over the place and foul up wall street markets. You've gone a long ways toward doing what you normally would do with warfare. Everybody Unknown Speaker 00:57 wants to connect to the internet today. The problem is that the internet is simply not ready for primetime. If we're talking about security reliability, so Deputy Secretary of Defense John Henry said, this is the most organized and systematic attack the Pentagon has seen to date. The fact that two kids with essentially no sophistication whatsoever, can break into all those systems is ludicrous. And the fact that the Pentagon is saying, we really have to go after all of the kids who are breaking into systems is a joke. If those systems are so unsecure, that they cannot withstand the most trivial of attacks, we aren't we are really living in a silly world, perhaps Unknown Speaker 01:48 we need a will have to have a Chernobyl of some kind in order to get people's attention. And that something like that could happen. And you've listed several of the dire things that have already happened more or less by accident those who who claimed to be selling safes systems are not really and it seemingly does not exist, are we not in position where the government is going to have to, to perhaps develop itself? Unknown Speaker 02:18 I believe that there's a lot of very good research in terms of security, authentication, anomaly misuse, detection of discovering what happens after you have been taken to the cleaners, I don't think we get a warm fuzzy feeling about what the US government is doing. I think that the industry is not doing a particularly great job, either. A lot of companies have still to recognize the severity of the problem. In some systems, there are some systems that won't be affected, because again, as I said, they recognize the. Unknown Speaker 03:05 Committee will be in order, please. The Governmental Affairs Committee. Unknown Speaker 03:30 Berlin computer security with 45 years of computer experience, I would invite anyone to review Dr. Norman's I'm informed that you think that within 30 minutes, the seven of you could make the internet unusable for the entire nation? Is that correct? That's correct. Unknown Speaker 03:56 Actually, one of us with just a few packets. I, we've told a few agencies about this. It's kind of funny because we think that this is something that the various government agencies should be actively going after we know the Department of Defense just did a very large investigation into what's known as denial of service attacks against the infrastructure. In our various day jobs. We contributed a large portion of the information to that actual investigation, much to our chagrin, the learnings from it were instantly classified, which we were giving them largely public information. It it is very trivial with the old protocols to segregate and separate the different major long haul providers, which would then be the national access points, the metropolitan area ether sections, at&t, can't talk to MCI can't talk to psi net, can't talk to alternate, et cetera, et cetera, and keep it down that way as long as we really wanted to do It would definitely take a few days for people to figure out what was going on Unknown Speaker 05:04 with the Federal Reserve or whatever, is it possible to design a foolproof system? Unknown Speaker 05:09 I don't think it's possible is not a foolproof system. But I don't think that should be the goal. The goal should be to make it very difficult to get in. The more difficult you make it the less risk that you assume from something a foreign nation state or teenage kid from breaking into that system. So the goal is to raise the bar and then have a plan to reconstitute after that effect. If it does happen. Can Unknown Speaker 05:33 you effect it? Mr. Newman? I think maybe you you're in
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