'Digital Pearl Harbor' May Be No Real Threat

Mon Dec 16 07:07:40 UTC 2002

On Mon, 16 Dec 2002, Sean Donelan wrote:
>
> Wall Street Journal
> Boomtown by Lee Gomes
> (subscription required)
> http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1039990777685324633,00.html
>
>   "As a result, homeland-security conferences, newsletters, sales offices
>   and the like have become a standard part of the technology-business
>   landscape. In the prototypical presentation, a salesperson describes
>   some crucial part of the high-tech infrastructure -- for example, the
>   router that moves messages around in a computer network -- and then
>   asks, "Imagine what would happen if terrorists got their hands on THAT!"
>
>   The better question, though, is, "How likely is it that terrorists would
>   actually get their hands on that?"

Could the goal of this be not 'hands on routers' but 'compromise service
provider's network' ? It seems to me that, provided the goal is to 'wreck
the internet' which isn't completely clear, gaining access to ISP
'internal' networks and from there access to the routers of that ISP would
be the goal. Heck, perhaps there are 'al-queda cells' which are actually
noc workers at ISPs? This would give them the in at ISPs and the ability
to affect the Internet on a mass scale, right?

Not that I subscribe to the idea that either: a) anyone who is a
'terrorist' cares about the Internet, b) turning the Internet off would do
anything other than increase print sales of magazines...

-Chris