America Staging New Drama- Cyber attack 'could fell US within 15 minutes'

sarbakaf

Siasat.pk - Blogger
The US must prepare itself for a full-scale cyber attack which could cause death and destruction across the country in less than 15 minutes, the former anti-terrorism Tsar to Bill Clinton and George W Bush has warned.



Alex Spillius in Washington
Published: 11:53PM BST 07 May 2010


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Former White House counterterrorism advisor Richard A Clarke
Photo: EPA


Richard Clarke claims that America's lack of preparation for the annexing of its computer system by terrorists could lead to an "electronic Pearl Harbor".
In his warning, Mr Clarke paints a doomsday scenario in which the problems start with the collapse of one of Pentagon's computer networks.

Soon internet service providers are in meltdown. Reports come in of large refinery fires and explosions in Philadelphia and Houston. Chemical plants malfunction, releasing lethal clouds of chlorine.
Air traffic controllers report several mid-air collisions, while subway trains crash in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. More than 150 cities are suddenly blacked out. Tens of thousands of Americans die in an attack comparable to a nuclear bomb in its devastation.
Yet it would take no more than 15 minutes and involve not a single terrorist or soldier setting foot in the United States.
The scenario is contained the pages of his book, Cyber War: The Next National Security Threat, written with Robert Knake.
And Mr Clarke has been right before.
As anti-terrorism tsar under Mr Clinton and then Mr Bush, he issued dire warnings of the need for better defences against al-Qaeda, and wrote about his futile campaign in the 2004 book Against All Enemies.
Now he argues that a similar lack of preparation could exact a tragic price.
"The biggest secret about cyber war may be that at the very same time the US prepares for offensive cyber war, it is continuing policies that make it impossible to defend effectively from cyber attack," says the book.
In part, the US has been hampered by the unforeseeable success of the internet and expansion of computerised networks, which are now used in almost every aspect of industry but have led to a hazardous degree of over-dependence.
The belief in the internet as the freewheeling, free-spirited epitome of American free speech has made government intrusion politically difficult, leaving the private sector particularly vulnerable to well-trained hackers.
Successive administrations, including President Barack Obama's, have failed to get to grips with the scale of the problem, believe Clarke and Knake, though they have kindred spirits dotted around the establishment.
The military has yet to open its new Cyber Command centre, amid disagreements about what role different agencies will play.
Meanwhile America may have invented the internet, but at least 30 nations have created offensive cyber-war capabilities, which aim to plant a variety of viruses and bugs into key utility, military and financial systems of other states.
The authors are convinced that there will at some point be a cyber-war between two nations and are concerned that such a conflict would "lower the threshold" for a war with bombs and bullets.
Ironically, the United States is currently far more vulnerable to cyberwar than Russia or China, or even North Korea, because those countries have not only concentrated on their cyber defences but are less reliant on the internet.
"We must have the ability to turn off our connection to the internet and still be able to continue to operate," Mr Knake, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Daily Telegraph. "Relying on a system as precarious as the internet is a big mistake.
"It is a fundamentally insecure ecosystem that is ripe for conflict and gives countries with disadvantages in conventional weapons an asymmetrical advantage." Britain, as a nanny state more tolerant of government interference, is far better prepared than its giant ally across the Atlantic.
The US has already experienced two major cyber warning shots. Hackers from Russia or China or both successfully planted software in the US electricity grid that left behind software that could be used to sabotage the system at a later date.
The North Koreans may not be able to feed their people but in 2009 they succeeded in bringing down the servers of the Department of Homeland Security, the US Treasury and several other government departments, along with regular internet providers, by flooding them with requests for data.
Most dramatically, it saturated the internet connections of a Pentagon server that the military would rely for logistical communications in an armed conflict.
"We need to rethink the premise that just because this took place with bits and bytes it wasn't a dangerous and destabilising action," said Mr Knake, who said they wrote the book "to start a conversation".

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biomat

Minister (2k+ posts)
Drifting satellite threatens US cable programming

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100511/ap_on_hi_te/out_of_control_satellite
By MICHAEL WEISSENSTEIN, Associated Press Writer Michael Weissenstein, Associated Press Writer – 1 min ago
LONDON – A TV communications satellite is drifting out of control thousands of miles above the Earth, threatening to wander into another satellite's orbit and interfere with cable programming across the United States, the satellites' owners said Tuesday.
Communications company Intelsat said it lost control of the Galaxy 15 satellite on April 8, possibly because the satellite's systems were knocked out by a solar storm. Intelsat cannot remotely steer the satellite to remain in its orbit, so Galaxy 15 is creeping toward the adjacent path of another TV communications satellite that serves U.S. cable companies.
Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably block or otherwise interfere with signals from the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23, according to AMC 11's owner, SES World Skies.
AMC 11 receives digital programming from cable television channels and transmits it to all U.S. cable networks from its orbit 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) above the equator, SES World Skies said. It operates on the same frequencies as Galaxy 15.
"That fact means that there is likely to be some kind of interference," SES World Skies spokesman Yves Feltes told The Associated Press. "Our aim is to bring any interference down to zero."
He would not name any of the cable television channels or providers that could be affected or say how long the interference could last.
Galaxy 15 is floating over the Pacific Ocean slightly to the east of Hawaii, said Emmet Fletcher, space surveillance and tracking manager for the Space Situational Awareness Programme at the European Space Agency, an 18-nation consortium.
He said Galaxy 15 was highly unusual because it continued to send out television signals, unlike other malfunctioning satellites that automatically went into complete shutdown when their navigational systems malfunctioned. A spokesman for the satellite's manufacturer, Orbital Sciences Corp., did not return a phone call seeking comment.
The dead satellites still are a threat to other satellities, but less of one than Galaxy 15 poses, Fletcher said.
"They'll just cruise around the geobelt, drifting wherever they go, potentially causing havoc, when you lose control of them," he said.
The geobelt is the relatively narrow band of space where satellites can move in orbits that allow them to appear stationary in the sky in relation to specific points on earth.
Feltes, the SES spokesman, said one option to prevent interference with U.S. television would be using AMC 11's propulsion system to shift that satellite about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away to an orbit that's still within its carefully prescribed "orbital box" but as far away as possible from Galaxy 15.
He said SES had other strategies under consideration but declined to provide details.
"We have all of our technicians, all of our specialists on this case," he said.
Both companies said there was no risk of an actual collision between the two satellites in space.
Intelsat said it was analyzing signals from Galaxy 15 daily in order to predict its trajectory and was trying to figure out if it can shut down the satellite's transmission so it would not interfere with AMC 11.
The company declined to comment on the value of Galaxy 15 but such spacecraft can be worth about $400 million (euro315 million) and cost about the same to launch.
Feltes said the two companies, both based in Luxembourg, were cooperating closely.
"They have tried numerous things to regain control of the satellite or to have it finally shut down," he said. "It needs some collaboration to bring the impact of this failure to an absolute minimum."