Destructive cyber attack inevitable: NSA chief

SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – The US National Security Agency (NSA) chief on Thursday urged top computer security specialists to harden the nation's critical infrastructure against inevitable destructive cyber attacks.

"This is an important time," NSA and Cyber Command director Gen. Keith Alexander said during a presentation at a premier RSA Conference in San Francisco.

"Most of the destructive tools being developed haven't been used; we need to use this window of opportunity to develop defenses."

Two days earlier, Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn gave a similar warning, saying the capability clearly exists for malicious software to cause real-world damage at power plants, water supplies and other vital points.

"Few weapons in the history of warfare, once created, have gone unused," Lynn said during a speech at RSA.

This is a premeditated consolidated agitprop campaign by the US security industrial complex to legalize in the USA the same software/hardware used to shut down the internet in Egypt.

Boeing subsidiary NARUS based out of Sunnyvale, CA will be the spearhead of this new level of government repression of 1st Amendment Rights.

This meme is being spread throughout every government MSM propaganda outlet in various forms in a coordinated fashion, the public opinion molding campaign is kicking into high gear now and will become a loud chorus in the coming weeks.

We’re all f****d, every person who steps out of the heard on online forums will be tagged and tracked like cattle in the near future. The technology is mature, the infrrasctructure is already in place and the NARUS suite of products can be grafted upon the US TelCo and Cable TV fiber network in under ayear of passage.

ALmost every Republican and Democrat in DC has been fully bought and paid for by Boeing and other security-industrial corporations, and Obama is their boy who wouldn’t dare speak a word against his masters.

Expect the Military Statists in the (R) party to floor the first bill, and expect widespread cross aisle support with very little if any MSM coverage of the bill.

I could tell you things that would not only make everybody squirm in their seats, but get me thrown in jail as well. Here's one problem. But it's only one of many.

The DoD used to keep a "closed network". You couldn't generally reach it unless you were in a facility that had a node on the network, or you were in one of the places where the network links terminated.

Around about the time that Clinton did away with TEMPEST, some other things happened that didn't exactly make headline news. One of these things were the operation of overlapping networks via waiver. Previously, the rules would have PROHIBITED this. But budgets were being heavily restricted and networking gear about that time was pricey. So classified networks were run on the same media as unclassified networks. During this time, I helped clean up some very MESSY mistakes whereby highly classified message traffic ended up on an unclassified network. To clean it up by the regs would have been cost prohibitive, so the authorities chose to do detailed damage control and simply debrief the few who ended up seeing the traffic but weren't authorized. What bothered us was that we couldn't guarantee that the data only went so far. Remember...this is the result of a budget squeeze.

As I remember, after the above SNAFU, it was prohibited again to run overlapping networks, but it was still permitted to tunnel classified traffic through an unclassified network so long as the classified traffic was appropriately encrypted.

Seems reasonable... right? On the surface, yes. It seems reasonable. The problem is that the communications media is shared. Unless it gives preference to the classified traffic, then a denial of service attack against the transporting links is very likely to cause a performance degradation of the encrypted link. It's sort of like sending very sensitive and IMPORTANT information via courier, but making the courier ride the bus...which then gets stuck in traffic. This is essentially why a destructive cyber attack is inevitable. We're vulnerable NOW, and have been for years. It's much worse today than it was back when I was associated with DoD. Now a link failure, or degradation can affect 911 service, trunked EMS, LEO, and fire department radio comms over a VAST geographic area... business and residential internet, AND traditional telephony service. The service carriers don't actually advertise how vulnerable their systems are.

This isn't for you, but for the purists out there... "YES" the Internet was indeed made to be redundant and there are many provisions within it for redundancy. But go to any major network provider and see what multi-path BGP costs and then you'll understand why the Internet isn't really as redundant as it should be. Redundancy is EXPENSIVE. So much crap has been piled on top of it that should have never been there because it's not subject to the usual telecomm tariffs, but nobody tells the truth about just how survivable it is.

It's truly a disaster waiting to happen.

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