[House Hearing, 108 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
OVERVIEW OF THE CYBER PROBLEM: A
NATION DEPENDENT AND DEALING
WITH RISK
=======================================================================
HEARING
of the
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CYBERSECURITY,
SCIENCE, AND RESEARCH, AND DEVELOPMENT
before the
SELECT COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED EIGHTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
JUNE 22, 2003
__________
Serial No. 108-13
__________
Printed for the use of the Select Committee on Homeland Security
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/
house
__________
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SELECT COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY
CHRISTOPHER COX, California, Chairman
JENNIFER DUNN, Washington JIM TURNER, Texas, Ranking Member
C.W. BILL YOUNG, Florida BENNIE G. THOMPSON, Mississippi
DON YOUNG, Alaska LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, JR., EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts
Wisconsin NORMAN D. DICKS, Washington
W.J. (BILLY) TAUZIN, Louisiana BARNEY FRANK, Massachusetts
DAVID DREIER, California JANE HARMAN, California
DUNCAN HUNTER, California BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland
HAROLD ROGERS, Kentucky LOUISE McINTOSH SLAUGHTER,
SHERWOOD BOEHLERT, New York New York
LAMAR S. SMITH, Texas PETER A. DeFAZIO, Oregon
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania NITA M. LOWEY, New York
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
PORTER J. GOSS, Florida ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON,
DAVE CAMP, Michigan District of Columbia
LINCOLN DIAZ-BALART, Florida ZOE LOFGREN, California
BOB GOODLATTE, Virginia KAREN McCARTHY, Missouri
ERNEST J. ISTOOK, JR., Oklahoma SHEILA JACKSON-LEE, Texas
PETER T. KING, New York BILL PASCRELL, JR., New Jersey
JOHN LINDER, Georgia DONNA M. CHRISTENSEN,
JOHN B. SHADEGG, Arizona U.S. Virgin Islands
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana BOB ETHERIDGE, North Carolina
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas CHARLES GONZALEZ, Texas
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada KEN LUCAS, Kentucky
KAY GRANGER, Texas JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
PETE SESSIONS, Texas KENDRICK B. MEEK, Florida
JOHN E. SWEENEY, New York
JOHN GANNON, Chief of Staff
UTTAM DHILLON, Chief Counsel and Deputy Staff Director
STEVE NASH, Democrat Staff Director
MICHAEL S. TWINCHEK, Chief Clerk
______
SUBCOMMITTEE ON CYBERSECURITY, SCIENCE, AND RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT
MAC THORNBERRY, Texas, Chairman
PETE SESSIONS, Texas, Vice Chairman ZOE LOFGREN, California
SHERWOOD BOEHLERT, New York LORETTA SANCHEZ, California
LAMAR SMITH, Texas ROBERT E. ANDREWS, New Jersey
CURT WELDON, Pennsylvania SHEILA JACKSON-LEE, Texas
DAVE CAMP, Michigan DONNA M. CHRISTENSEN,
ROBERT W. GOODLATTE, Virginia U.S. Virgin Islands
PETER KING, New York BOB ETHERIDGE, North Carolina
JOHN LINDER, Georgia CHARLES GONZALEZ, Texas
MARK SOUDER, Indiana KEN LUCAS, Kentucky
JIM GIBBONS, Nevada JAMES R. LANGEVIN, Rhode Island
KAY GRANGER, Texas KENDRICK B. MEEK, Florida
CHRISTOPHER COX, CALIFORNIA, ex JIM TURNER, Texas, ex officio
officio
(ii)
C O N T E N T S
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Page
STATEMENTS
The Honorable Mac Thornberry, Chairman, Subcommittee on
Cybersecurity, Science, and Research and Development, and a
Representative in Congress From the State of Texas
Oral Statement................................................. 1
Prepared Statement............................................. 2
The Honorable Christopher Cox, Chairman, Select Committee on
Homeland Security, and a Representative in Congress From the
State of California
Prepared Statement............................................. 3
The Honorable Robert E. Andrews, a Representative in Congress
From the State of New Jersey................................... 36
The Honorable Sherwood Boehlert, a Representative in Congress
From the State of New York..................................... 34
The Honorable Bob Etheridge, a Representative in Congress From
the State of North Carolina.................................... 6
The Honorable Jim Gibbons, a Representative in Congress From the
State of Nevada
Oral Statement................................................. 43
Prepared Statement............................................. 4
The Honorable James R. Langevin, a Representative in Congress
From the State of Rhode Island................................. 45
The Honorable Sheila Jackson-Lee, a Representative in Congress
From the State of Texas
Oral Statement................................................. 49
Prepared Statement............................................. 5
The Honorable Zoe Lofgren, a Representative in Congress From the
State of California............................................ 1
The Honorable Pete Sessions, a Representative in Congress From
the State of Texas............................................. 45
The Honorable Lamar S. Smith, a Representative in Congress From
the State of Texas............................................. 39
The Honorable Jim Turner, a Representative in Congress From the
State of Texas................................................. 47
WITNESSES
Mr. Alan Paller, Director of Research, The SANS Institute
Oral Statement................................................. 27
Prepared Statement............................................. 30
Mr. Richard D. Pethia, Director Cert Centers, Software
Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Oral Statement................................................. 19
Prepared Statement............................................. 21
Mr. Bruce Schneier, Founder and Chief Technical Officer
Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.
Oral Statement................................................. 7
Prepared Statement............................................. 8
OVERVIEW OF THE CYBER PROBLEM: A NATION DEPENDENT AND DEALING WITH RISK
----------
Wednesday, June 25, 2003
U.S.House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science,
and Research and Development,
Select Committee on Homeland Security,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 11:30 a.m., in room
345, Cannon House Office Building, Hon. Mac Thornberry
[chairman of the subcommittee] presiding.
Present: Representatives Thornberry, Sessions, Boehlert,
Smith, Gibbons, Lofgren, Andrews, Jackson-Lee, Christensen,
Etheridge, Lucas, Langevin, and Turner [ex officio].
Mr. Thornberry. The hearing will come to order. The
Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Science, and Research and
Development is meeting today to hear testimony on an Overview
of the Cyber Problem: A Nation Dependent and Dealing with Risk.
And Ms. Lofgren and I ask unanimous consent that all members be
able to submit written opening statements but that oral written
statements be waived beyond the Chairman and Ranking Member.
Without objection, it is so ordered.
We do have some time constraints on how long we can use
this room, so we want to keep our comments to a minimum and get
right to it. Let me just say that this subcommittee is charged
with a number of homeland security responsibilities. One of the
most complex is this issue of cyber security: the online world
of computers, networks, information, and the physical and
virtual lines that tie it all together. Obviously our country
is becoming more and more dependent upon the Internet and
information technologies. That growing dependence just as
obviously leads to greater vulnerabilities, and part of our job
in this subcommittee is to try to get our arms around those
issues and see if there are other Federal actions that may need
to be taken.
We are pleased to have a distinguished group of witnesses
to help us get our arms around those issues today. Before
yielding to them, let me yield to the distinguished Ranking
Member, Ms. Lofgren.
Ms. Lofgren. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks for
calling this hearing today. I first want to offer an apology.
At noon I am chairing another meeting of the California
delegation and so will have to slip out for a while, but I want
to assure the panelists that I have read their testimony and
look forward to working with them in the future.
I think this is an important hearing to scope out the
elements of the challenges that we face, and I hope with regard
to the DHS itself, that the witnesses will share their opinions
on the newly created Cybersecurity Division, talk about the
meetings they have had, if they have had; if you have concerns
about the placement of the division within DHS, please share
that. Will it have access to the Secretary? Sit buried too
deep? I have some skepticism about the DHS plan for
cybersecurity. I fear that we are moving too slowly. If you
think that is correct, let me know. If my fears are misplaced,
I would love to know that as well.
I would also--looking beyond DHS, I would hope that you
could enlighten us as to what steps the Federal Government
might take to encourage the private sector to make
cybersecurity a higher priority. And I would especially like to
welcome Bruce Schneier, who I have known for many, many years
and thank him for coming all the way out to be a panelist as
well as the two other really spectacular witnesses.
So, Mac, it is great working with you, and I look forward
to the hearing.
[The information follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT THE HONORABLE MAC THORNBERRY, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS
I want to welcome Members, witnesses, and guests to this hearing.
This subcommittee is charged with oversight of several important issues
related to homeland security. One of the most complex and least
understood resides in the world of ``cyberspace''--the on-line world of
computers, networks, information, and the physical and virtual lines
that tie it all together.
Some have called cyberspace the information super highway. Its
roads are becoming more crowded and more dangerous, and today's seat
belts and guard rails may not be adequate for the challenges that lie
ahead. Unlike our physical highways, however, governments do not own
most of the roads, and there is much that we do not know about how to
make them safe and secure for everyone to travel.
The steady rise in electronic commerce, e-government, and
Americans' everyday reliance on the Internet make it even more
important that we better understand the threats, vulnerabilities,
risks, and recovery options. Even more importantly, the public and
private sectors must establish new partnerships and better ways to
jointly establish appropriate rules of the road to promote commerce,
protect privacy, and make the Internet safer for all travelers.
We do not yet fully appreciate America's dependency on this
borderless, virtual world, but we know it is growing--and it is growing
fast. Only 90,000 Americans had Internet access in early 1993 (U.S.
Internet Council, Apr. 1999). By 2002, the number of Internet users
surpassed 665 million (Computer Industry Almanac, Inc., Dec. 2002).
We don't know how all of the nation's critical infrastructures are
linked and dependent upon each other, but we know adversaries,
criminals, hackers, and terrorists are trying to figure out how to
exploit our weaknesses. We may not fully appreciate the difference
between a cyber crime and a cyber attack on our critical
infrastructure, but we know the immediate results have cost us billions
of dollars in productivity and financial loss. According to the
Computer Emergency Response Team at Carnegie Mellon University the
number of vulnerabilities have doubled each year for the past five
years. According to Chief Security Officer Magazine, nine out of ten
Chief Security Officers indicate their companies have been victimized
by cyber attacks in the past year. There may come a time when a cyber
incident could also cost American lives, especially if there are
concurrent attacks on physical and virtual infrastructures.
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 gives the Department of Homeland
Security a central role in working with the private sector and with
state, local, federal, and international entities to help secure
cyberspace. Understanding threats to cyberspace, identifying
vulnerabilities that could be exploited, and coordinating response and
recovery efforts needed to ensure services are delivered across our
critical infrastructure are some of the key functions for the new
Department and the areas we will cover today. A panel of three academic
and industry experts will help us understand three foundational
issues--cyber threats, vulnerabilities, and response and recovery.
Mr. Bruce Schneier is Founder and Chief Technical
Officer, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., a consulting firm
specializing in cryptography and computer security. He will
focus on the cyber threats within the nation's critical
infrastructure.
Mr. Richard Pethia is Director, CERT Centers, Software
Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. CERT has
provided a central response and coordination facility for
global information security incident response and
countermeasures for cyber threats and vulnerabilities since
1988. He will focus on the vulnerabilities facing the nation's
critical information infrastructure.
Mr. Alan Paller is Director of Research, the SANS
Institute, a cooperative research organization that delivers
cybersecurity education to people who secure and manage
important information systems. He will focus on response and
recovery by the private sector and government to the threats
and vulnerabilities facing the nation's critical information
infrastructure.
Their testimony will help us put into perspective the industry,
academic, and government partnerships needed to help the Department of
Homeland Security perform its mission as it relates to cyberspace. Our
ultimate goal is a superhighway that is safe, accessible, fast, and
free of unnecessary speed bumps.
Before yielding, I want to thank Eric Fischer and his team from the
Congressional Research Service who have again done significant work to
help prepare for this hearing. Finally, I want to thank my partner on
this subcommittee, Ms. Zoe Lofgren, for her leadership and expertise in
these issues. And I would yield to her at this time.
PREPARED OPENING REMARKS OF THE HONORABLE CHRISTOPHER COX, CHAIRMAN,
SELECT COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND COMMITTEE
Since May 16th, what was thought to be a Trojan--named Stumbler, that
carry potential computer viruses, had been randomly scanning internet
connected machines. Private internet security companies, the FBI, and
the Department of Homeland Security have been tracking this rogue
activity since an employee at a defense contractor notified both the
FBI and the CERT Coordination Center. What concerned most experts was
the ease with which this ``Stumbler'' could be reprogrammed to make it
more damaging.
The ``Perimeter Defense Model'' for computer security has been used
since the first mainframe operating systems were built. This model is
primarily based on the assumption that we need to protect computer
systems from the ``inside.'' Based on this underlying assumption,
cybersecurity has emphasized ``firewalls'' and other mechanisms to keep
outside attackers from penetrating our computer systems. The continued
investigation has revealed that the attacker deliberately planted the
``Stumbler'', clearly circumventing any internal firewalls.
We need new solutions to prepare for increasingly aggressive
attacks on our cyber-information infrastructure. Our society is
increasingly interconnected. Our financial institutions, power plants,
nuclear facilities, water treatment plants, factories, government
agencies, borders, and other critical infrastructure rely upon
internet-based technologies for remote monitoring and control of the
facilities. While this capability has allowed for amazing advances and
improvements in the delivery of services, it also allows for potential
access of a cyber-terrorist to each network.
As we begin to look outside established paradigms and partner with
the private sector, we have to make securing our information
infrastructure an urgent priority. By harnessing the technical
resources of the private industry and the intelligence capability of
the federal government, we begin a partnership that can prevent,
protect, and respond to a Cyberattack.
We lead the world in information technology. The exponential net
gain of knowledge over the past decade has led to a pervasive
dependence on information and communication systems that affects every
aspect of our lives. The good news is the potential this represents to
improve the quality of life around the world. But there is also bad
news; this growing reliance makes our cyberspace a viable target for
terrorists. The very same information technology that has enabled this
country to be a leader in the world market can be co-opted by
terrorists and used against this country's infrastructure. This type of
technology is no longer the exclusive domain of states. Non-state
sponsored groups with limited technical capabilities have the capacity
to inflict great harm to our safety and economy. A serious attack could
potentially cripple our emergency response, health care delivery,
transportation, electric grids, and finance systems. A precision attack
by a simple virus that would prevent for just one day our ability to
cash a paycheck, prevent stocks from being traded or make a credit card
purchase could bring much of our commerce to a halt. Consider the
Saphire computer virus. It infected at least 75,000 hosts and caused
network outages, cancelled airline flights, interfered with elections,
caused ATM machines to fail, and shut down a 9-1-1 call center outside
Seattle, which serves 14 fire departments, two police stations, and a
community of 164,000 people.
Essentially, every major critical infrastructure in this nation is
a public/private partnership and cyberspace is its ``nerve center.'' We
can not be successful in securing the vested common interest without a
coordinated and focused partnership between the federal government and
the private sector. The private sector brings to this partnership the
expertise and technical capability. The government, in turn, can
provide the intelligence information, set the standards, and provide
the corporate incentives to bridge this partnership.
Cyberspace challenges us with some urgency to define the role of
the federal government in this partnership to secure our infrastructure
and make America safe. For this reason, I established this subcommittee
on Cybersecurity--the only such subcommittee in Congress. Cyberspace is
indeed a new frontier that the United States must master. This
Committee enthusiastically supports the steps that the Department of
Homeland Security has taken in establishing the National Cyber Security
Division (NCSD) under the Department's Information Analysis and
Infrastructure Protection Directorate. Information exchange and
cooperation will allow both the government and the private sector to
address awareness, training, technological improvements, vulnerability
remediation and recovery operations. We will continue to look to
enhance the capability of DHS to stand up this office, to coordinate
government Cyber programs and to partner with the private sector--all
as a matter of the highest priority.
I thank Chairman Thornberry for his leadership of the Subcommittee
on Cybersecurity, Science, and Research and Development and I look
forward to hearing from our three witnesses this morning.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE JIM GIBBONS, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS, FROM THE STATE OF NEVADA
Mr. Chairman, I would like to express to you my gratitude for
theopportunity to hear from our expert witnesses and for bringing us
together to address the issues before us today.
I would also like to thank Mr. Schneier, Mr. Pethia, and Mr. Paller for
taking time out of their busy schedules to prepare their testimony and
come before us today in an effort to make our country safer.
These gentlemen should be a great help in assisting us in understanding
the nature of the challenges before us.
Certainly, the security of our cyber-infrastructure is extremely
important to the safety of our country and our economy.
There is no doubt that our economy, the largest and most dynamic in the
world, is extremely dependent on our country's cyber-infrastructure,
and it needs to be protected with extreme vigilance.
However, I would like to express my concern about our understanding of
the nature of the threats to our cyber-infrastructure, and how we are
going about addressing these threats.
Unquestionably, an extremely wide variety and high volume of criminal
threats to our cyber-infrastructure exist. These threats range from
benign computer hacking committed by bored teenagers, to organized
criminals stealing and laundering billions of dollars around the world
via the internet.
However, while examples of criminal attacks abound, the examples of
cyber-terrorism, at this point, are sparse, and this begs the question:
Why?
Presently, the internet seems to be an extremely valuable tool to
terrorists for the same reason it is an extremely valuable tool to
legitimate commercial enterprises and private citizens: it is the
supreme medium for communication.
To my knowledge, the only known terrorism-oriented web-launched attack
on major infrastructure has occurred in Australia, where the individual
responsible dumped sewage into public waterways.
While this certainly provides an example of the damage which can be
caused by malicious individuals, it is only a single example, and does
not seem to bear witness to the catastrophic cyber terrorism we often
hear is at our doorstep.
My intent is not to dismiss the danger that is genuinely posed by our
cyber vulnerabilities. It exists and is accepted.
However, it is my great concern that the nature of the threat of cyber-
terrorism is being overlooked, and therefore, being addressed
improperly.
We cannot properly devise an effective strategy to counter cyber-
terrorism if we do not understand the nature of the capabilities of our
enemies, and especially if we do not understand the nature of our own
vulnerabilities.
I welcome the comments of our witnesses today on the nature of our
infrastructure vulnerabilities, and specifically if these
vulnerabilities are easily exploitable for mass-disruption attacks.
Further, I welcome comment on the nature of the intellectual and
materiel capabilities needed by a terrorist organization to succeed in
causing a major internet-based attack on our cyber-infrastructure, and
especially our physical infrastructure.
In seeking to understand how best to address the threat of cyber-
terrorism, we must begin first by asking the right questions.
This must lead to an understanding of ourselves and our enemies, from
which we can craft a successful strategy.
I welcome the candor of our witnesses in addressing these concerns, and
thank them in advance.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE SHEILA JACKSON-LEE, A
REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF TEXAS
Mr. Chairman, I thank you for your efforts in creating this
opportunity for this body to hear the testimony of the three panelists
today. In our task of gauging the newly developed Department of
Homeland Security against the projected needs of our nation, we must
begin our evaluation at the most basic levels. Critical infrastructure
protection is important to every member of our national and local
communities. In order to implement a program of securing cyberspace at
a national level, we must follow a course of risk assessment,
education, and careful reaction at the local level to protect our
schools, hospitals, and rescue facilities. These goals are part of the
impetus for the amendments that I offered as to the Department of
Homeland Security Appropriations Act and to the Project BioShield Act
so that funding mechanisms and the Secretary's discretion contain the
control provisions necessary to ensure the proper and effective
allocation of resources to the places that have the most urgent needs.
Just as we must ward against the large threats to our critical
infrastructure, the small incidents must not be allowed to create a
large problem.
In Houston last year, a 21-year-old man was sentenced to three
years in prison for a terrorist hoax concerning a plot to attack the
opening ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The
Houston resident was sentenced by U.S. District Judge and ordered to
pay $5,200 in fines. The Judge told the Defendant that she had
sentenced him to three years because he had failed to demonstrate he
understood the seriousness of his crime and disruption he had caused to
federal agencies and private citizens.
The perpetrator told the FBI in Houston that he had intercepted e-
mails between two terrorists plotting a missile attack during the
opening Olympic ceremonies on February 8, 2002. The e-mails supposedly
detailed plans to attack Salt Lake City with missiles launched from
northern Russia.
He later confessed to making up the story during questioning, telling
agents that stress led him to tell his tale and that he had fabricated
the e-mails.
Just a few months ago, Federal prosecutors charged a University of
Texas student with breaking into a school database and stealing more
than 55,000 student, faculty and staff names and Social Security
numbers in one of the nation's biggest cases of data theft involving a
university. The student, a twenty-year old junior studying natural
sciences, turned himself in at the U.S. Secret Service office in
Austin, Texas. He was charged with unauthorized access to a protected
computer and using false identification with intent to commit a federal
offense. This incident sent a wave of fear across the campus of the
nation's largest university, causing students and staff to consider
replacing credit cards and freezing bank accounts. The student-
perpetrator was released without bail and thereafter had limited access
to computers. If convicted, the student faced as many as five years in
prison and a $500,000 fine. After searching this student's Austin and
Houston residences, Secret Service agents recovered the names and
Social Security numbers on a computer in his Austin home. According to
the indictment, Phillips wrote and executed a computer program in early
March that enabled him to break into the university database that
tracks staff attendance at training programs, reminding us how
vulnerable we all are even when our Social Security number is misused.
To combat the vulnerability linked to Social Security numbers, the
university to limit its dependence on Social Security numbers as
database identifiers and instead use an electronic identification
number that matches only to Social Security numbers in an encrypted
database. This data theft was probably the largest ever at a
university.
Therefore, since the threat to critical infrastructure is realized
at a very local level, we must channel our resources and technology to
the first-responders and leaders in the local communities. The movement
to securing our homeland needs to be expansive, not retractive. If our
local hubs and first-responders are disabled by a terror threat, we
would have a hard time developing effective protective measures for our
nation as a whole.
Mr. Chairman, again, I thank you for your time and effort in this
matter.
PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE BOB ETHERIDGE, A REPRESENTATIVE IN
CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA
Thank you, Chairman Thornberry and Ranking Member Lofgren, for
holding this hearing. I would also like to welcome our witnesses to
this important hearing on cybersecurity. I am looking forward to
hearing how industry and academia view this issue.
Cybersecurity is a critical, yet elusive, concept for many people
to grasp. You cannot see cyberterrorists attacking a network. There are
no burning buildings or collapsing structures. When a virus hits our
computers we may experience the annoyance of slow e-mail, spam or the
inability to access the Internet. What we do not see until later are
the costs in lost productivity and lost business in our electronically
connected world. Since the Y2K bugs were worked out at the change of
the millennium, cybersecurity has largely disappeared from the public
consciousness. Yet, it is critical that the Department of Homeland
Security encourage and foster research into protecting our country from
these stealth attacks.
The Department must work in concert with private industry which not
only owns more than 80 percent of our critical cyber infrastructure but
also develops software products to run our businesses, our 911
emergency systems and our personal computers.
All of the witnesses today have made a number of suggestions for
improving our nation's critical cyber infrastructure, and I am
encouraged that they assign a great deal of responsibility to
businesses to police their own systems and cooperate with the federal
government in reporting attacks and breaches so that others may learn
from the experience.
The Department of Homeland Security must promote science and math
education for our children who will be our future software programmers
and cyberwarriors. In the 2001 Hart-Rudman report ``Road Map for
National Security: Imperative for Change,'' the authors state that the
greatest threat to our country, second only to the detonation of a
weapon of mass destruction, would be ``a failure to manage properly
science, technology and education for the common good over the next
quarter century.''
A number of studies have shown that American students sorely lag
behind their counterparts in other nations in science and math
education. Even though they use computers every day for homework or to
play games, many students who do go on to college do not enter
technology fields because they see it as ``too hard.''
The federal government and private industry must work together with
schools across the country to improve basic science and math education
by providing teachers with the opportunities for advanced training in
these fields, the proper equipment for labs and experiments, and time
to teach. Gifted teachers prove every day that students can learn and
come to love science and math. Our children are our future, and
investment now in their education will provide benefits for many years
to come.
Mr. Thornberry. I thank you, and I do want to thank the
witnesses, too. We have had some scheduling back and forth for
this hearing because of the full committee schedule, and I
thank each of you for your flexibility and help in putting this
on.
Finally I also want to thank Eric Fischer and his team at
the Congressional Research Service who continue to help us in
preparing for these hearings, as well as the folks in my office
and Ms. Lofgren's office as well. Let me now turn to our
witnesses. First we have Mr. Bruce Schneier, Founder and Chief
Technical Officer of Counterpane Internet Security, Inc., a
consulting firm specializing in cryptography and computer
security. Mr. Schneier has written several books and articles.
We are pleased to have you with us today, and your full
statement will be made part of the record and you may summarize
it as you see fit.
STATEMENT OF BRUCE SCHNEIER, FOUNDER AND CHIEF TECHNICAL
OFFICER, COUNTERPANE INTERNET SECURITY, INC.
Mr. Schneier. Thanks for having me. I am actually the
Founder and CTO of Counterpane, but I am not here under the
auspices of Counterpane. I am probably going to say things
counter to my company's interest, but I am here as a security
expert, as an author, as a lecturer. So I do want to make that
clear.
I was asked to talk about risks, and I talk about this in
my written testimony. To summarize it very quickly, attacks are
getting worse. I mean, every year we are seeing worse and worse
attacks, primarily because, you know, hackers are getting more
clever, and the tools they are writing are more interesting. At
the same time, the expertise required to launch attacks is
going down. Point/click interfaces--just as the word processors
are easier to use, your hacker tools are easier to use.
There is a rise in crime, and I think this is a very
important trend. We are seeing far more criminal activity on
the Net. My company does a lot of security monitoring, and a
lot of times the hardest problem we have is finding the
criminal attacks amongst all the kids, amongst all the
vandalism, amongst all the petty things.
Security is getting worse, and this is a hard thing to
understand. I have written about it, and I urge you to read it.
The complexity of software, of systems, causes lots of
vulnerabilities, and these are getting worse faster than we are
improving. Security products tend not to be very good. Software
quality is abysmal. And I read the other testimonies you are
going to hear, and we are all saying these sorts of things. The
effect of this is that we are more and more insecure than we
have ever been.
You said that we are also relying on the Internet more. So
we are seeing more insecurities, yet it is more important; and
this is a problem that I actually can't solve. This is not a
technology problem, and what I really want to say in sort of my
few minutes is how I need your help. This is a political
problem, not a technology problem. The problem is that each
company, each individual, installs security products, does
security commensurate with their own risk. So a home user
doesn't have much risk, doesn't care much, won't do much. A
business will do whatever it has to do for its own risk. A
software company will produce as secure a software as it has
to.
The problem is most of the risks we face as a Nation are
residual. So a company might have a risk to their business, but
there is ancillary risk borne by everybody else, and that
company is not going to secure itself to the level of the
ancillary risk, only to the level of their risk. In economics
it is called an externality. It is the effect of a decision
that is not taken into account in the decision.
So an example might be--in environmentalism, a plant might
pollute a river because it makes business sense, but the people
living downstream don't factor into their decision. Someone
might choose not to get married--a welfare mother might choose
not to get married because they will lose their welfare
benefits, so they are making a rational decision based on their
own interests; yet the effects to society of unwed people
living together en masse, it doesn't factor in.
And computer security is largely stuck with these
externalities, and that is the basic problem I have. And the
way we deal with this in society is we try to somehow take
those externalities and bring them into the decision. So laws
and regulations are ways to do that. Liability is a way to do
that. These are ways to make the effects of the actions of an
individual organization, to make them responsible for them.
So for recommendations, I would like very much to see
cybersecurity risks be subject to liabilities. To me it is
absolutely insane that Firestone can produce a tire with a
systemic flaw and be liable and for companies to produce
software with, you know, three systemic flaws per month and not
be liable. That just doesn't work. Liabilities will
instantaneously improve security, because it will make it in a
company's best interest to improve security.
I would like to see the government use its own purchasing
power to improve security. You guys have enormous procurement
power. I would like you to secure your own networks, secure
your own systems, buy products and demand security. The nice
thing about software is you do the work once, and everybody
benefits. If you do massive procurement and design--give us
secure systems, everybody will benefit.
This is not easy, all right? You are going to have other
hearings. Software companies will tell you that liabilities
will hurt them. Well, of course it will. An auto manufacturer
will tell you the same thing. We would rather not be liable. We
would like to produce features on our cars and we don't care if
they crash.
I would like to see ISPs produce firewalls for their
individuals. They will tell you that will hurt our business. Of
course it will. Just like a building will tell you to making
our building to fire codes makes it more expensive. Well, yes,
it does. The point of security is that it costs money, and
unless we make it so that it is in business's best interest to
spend it, they won't. We can solve the technical problems if
the business impetus is there. We can't do it without. And I am
pleased to take questions after the other two gentlemen.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you very much. I appreciate your
testimony.
[The statement of Mr. Schneier follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT MR. BRUCE SCHNEIER, FOUNDER AND CHIEF TECHNICAL
OFFICER COUNTERPANE INTERNET SECURITY, INC.
Mr. Chairman, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity
to testify today regarding cybersecurity, particularly in its relation
to homeland defense and our nation's critical infrastructure. My name
is Bruce Schneier, and I have worked in the field of computer security
for my entire career. I am the author of seven books on the topic,
including the best-selling Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a
Networked World [1]. My newest book is entitled Beyond Fear: Thinking
Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World [2], and will be
published in September. In 1999, I founded Counterpane Internet
Security, Inc., where I hold the position of Chief Technical Officer.
Counterpane Internet Security provides real-time security monitoring
for hundreds of organizations, including several offices of the federal
government.
Cyber Risks
When I began my long career in computer security, it was a marginal
discipline. The only interest was from the military and a few scattered
privacy advocates. The Internet has changed all that. The promise of
the Internet is to be a mirror of society. Everything we do in the real
world--all of our social and business interactions and transactions--we
want to do on the Internet: conduct private conversations, keep
personal papers, sign letters and contracts, speak anonymously, rely on
the integrity of information, gamble, vote, publish authenticated
documents. All of these things require security. Computer security is a
fundamental enabling technology of the Internet; it's what transforms
the Internet from an academic curiosity into a serious business tool.
The limits of security are the limits of the Internet. And no business
or person is without these security needs.
The risks are real. Everyone talks about the direct risks: theft of
trade secrets, customer information, money. People also talk about the
productivity losses due to computer security problems. What's the loss
to a company if its e-mail goes down for two days? Or if ten people
have to scramble to clean up after a particularly nasty intrusion? I've
seen figures in the billions quoted for total losses from Internet
epidemics like Nimda and the SQL Slammer; most of that is due to these
productivity losses.
More important are the indirect risks: loss of customers, damage to
brand, loss of goodwill. When a successful attack against a corporation
is made public, the victim may experience a drop in stock price. When
CD Universe suffered a large (and public) theft of credit card numbers
in early 2000, it cost them dearly in their war for market share
against Amazon.com and CDNow. In the aftermath of public corporate
attacks, companies often spent more money and effort containing the
public relations problem than fixing the security problem. Financial
institutions regularly keep successful attacks secret, so as not to
worry their customer base.
And more indirect risks are coming as a result of litigation.
European countries have strict privacy laws; companies can be held
liable if they do not take steps to protect the privacy of their
customers. The U.S. has similar laws in particular industries--banking
and healthcare--and there are bills in Congress to protect privacy more
generally. We have not yet seen shareholder lawsuits against companies
that failed to adequately secure their networks and suffered the
consequences, but they're coming. Can company officers be held
personally liable if they fail to provide for network security? The
courts will be deciding this question in the next few years.
This hearing was convened to address another type of risk: the
risks of our nation's critical infrastructure that is largely in the
hands of private companies. One of the great challenges of
cybersecurity is the interdependencies between individual networks. The
security decisions one company makes about their own network can have
far-reaching effects across many networks, and this leads us to
different sorts of risks. I call these ancillary risks because their
effects are ancillary to the particular network in question. Ancillary
risks abound in cyberspace. For example, home computer users are at
risk of attack and of having their machines taken over by others, but
an ancillary risk is created when their attacked and taken-over
computers can be used for further attacks against other networks.
Vulnerabilities in software create a risk for the corporation marketing
that software, but they also creates an ancillary risk for those who
use that software in their networks.
The cybersecurity risks to our nation are largely ancillary;
because our critical infrastructure is largely in the hands of private
companies, there are risks to our nation that go beyond what those
private companies are worried about. The telephone network has value to
the telephone companies because that's how they get revenue, and those
companies will secure their networks to that value. But the network has
value to the country as a nationwide communications structure in
addition to that, and there are ancillary risks as a result of that.
Companies put themselves at risk when they purchase and use insecure
software, but they also cause ancillary risks to everyone else on the
Internet because that software is on a common network. These ancillary
risks turn out to be critical to the current insecurities of
cyberspace, and addressing them will give us the only real way to
improve the situation.
As risky as the Internet is, companies have no choice but to be
there. The lures of new markets, new customers, new revenue sources,
and new business models are just so great that companies have flocked
to the Internet regardless of the risks. There is no alternative.
Governments feel the same sorts of pressures: better ways of
interacting with citizens, more efficient ways of disseminating
information, greater involvement of citizens in government. The
Internet is here to stay, and we're going to be using it for more and
more things regardless of the risks. This, more than anything else, is
why computer security is so important.
Quantifying the Risks
Quantifying the risks is difficult, because we simply don't have
the data. Most of what we know is anecdotal, and what statistics we
have are difficult to generalize. In summary, cyberattacks are very
common on the Internet. Corporations are broken into regularly, usually
by hackers who have no motivation other than simple bragging rights.
There is considerable petty vandalism on the Internet, and sometimes
that vandalism becomes large-scale and system-wide. Crime is rising on
the Internet, both individual fraud and corporate crime. We know all
this is happening, because all surveys, corporate studies, and
anecdotal evidence agree. We just don't know exact numbers.
For the past eight years, the Computer Security Institute has
conducted an annual computer crime survey of U.S. corporations,
government agencies, and other organizations [3]. The details are a bit
numbing, but the general trends are that most networks are repeatedly
and successfully attacked in a variety of ways, the monetary losses are
considerable, and there's not much that technology can do to prevent
it. In particular, the 2003 survey found the following:
56% of respondents reported ``unauthorized use of
computer systems'' in the last year. 29% said that they had no
such unauthorized uses, and 15% said that they didn't know. The
number of incidents was all over the map, and the number of
insider versus outsider incidents was roughly equal. 78% of
respondents reported their Internet connection as a frequent
point of attack (this has been steadily rising over the six
years), 18% reported remote dial-in as a frequent point of
attack (this has been declining), and 30% reported internal
systems as a frequent point of attack (also declining).
The types of attack range from telecommunications
fraud to laptop theft to sabotage. 36% experienced a system
penetration, 42% a denial-of-service attack. 21% reported theft
of proprietary information, and 15% financial fraud. 21%
reported sabotage. 25% had their Web sites hacked (another 22%
didn't know), and 23% had their Web sites hacked ten or more
times (36% of the Web site hacks resulted in vandalism, 35% in
denial of service, and 6% included theft of transaction
information).
One interesting thing highlighted by this survey is
that all of these attacks occurred despite the widespread
deployment of security technologies: 98% have firewalls, 73% an
intrusion detection system, 92% access control of some sort,
49% digital IDs. It seems that these much-touted security
products provide only partial security against attackers.
Unfortunately, the CSI data is based on voluntary responses to
surveys. The data only includes information about attacks that the
companies knew about, and only those attacks that they are willing to
admit to in a survey. Undoubtedly, the real numbers of attacks are much
higher. And the people who complete the CSI survey are those
experienced in security; companies who are much less security savvy are
not included in this survey. These companies undoubtedly experience
even more successful attacks and even higher losses.
The Honeynet Project is another source of data. This is an academic
research project that measures actual computer attacks on the Internet.
According to their most recent statistics [4], published in 2001, a
random computer on the Internet is scanned dozens of times a day. The
average life expectancy of a default installation of a Linux Red Hat
6.2 server--that is, the time before someone successfully hacks it--is
less than 72 hours. A common home user setup, with Windows 98 and file
sharing enabled, was successfully hacked five times in four days.
Systems are subjected to hostile vulnerability scans dozens of times a
day. And the fastest time for a server being hacked: 15 minutes after
plugging it into the network. This data correlates with my own
anecdotal experience of putting computers on an unsecured home
broadband network.
At Counterpane Internet Security, we keep our own statistics. In
2002, we monitored several hundred computer networks in over thirty
countries. We processed 160 billion network events, in which we
uncovered 105 million security alerts. Further processing yielded
237,000 ``tickets'' which were investigated by our trained security
analysts, resulting in 19,000 customer contacts from immediate security
incidents. Assuming our data is representative, a typical company in
the United States experiences 800 critical network security events--
events requiring immediate attention--each year. At Counterpane we're
smart and experienced enough to ensure that none of those events
results in financial losses for the companies we protect, but most
companies do not have such vigilant cyber guards.
Cybersecurity Trends
Several cybersecurity trends are worth highlighting. First, over
the past few decades attacks on individual computers, early networks,
and then the Internet have continually gotten more severe. Attack tools
have gotten more potent, more damaging, more effective. Attacks that
were once slow to implement are now automated. Attacks that used to be
defeatable by a single mechanism are now adaptive. Viruses, worms, and
Trojans are more elaborate and intelligent; malicious programs that
years ago took weeks to spread across cyberspace, and last year took
hours, today spread in minutes.
Second, over that same time period, the expertise required to
launch those attacks has gone down. Many attack tools are easy to use.
They have point-and-click interfaces. They are automated. They don't
require any expertise to operate. ``Root kits'' are both easier to use
and more effective.
These two trends combine to exacerbate another trend: the rise of
crime in cyberspace. The vast majority of cyberspace attacks are
nothing more than petty vandalism: the Internet equivalent of spray
painting. The attackers aren't after anything except a cheap thrill and
bragging rights. Sometimes they're bored teenagers. Sometimes they're
smart kids with no other outlet. But we're starting to see significant
increases in real crime on the Internet. Criminals, who often don't
have the computer expertise to break into networks, can employ these
easy-to-use tools to commit crimes. Credit card thefts and other forms
of fraud are on the rise. Identity theft is on the rise. Extortion is
on the rise. At Counterpane, often the hardest job we have is detecting
these criminal attacks among the hundreds of petty vandalism attacks. I
expect this trend to continue as more criminals discover the value of
committing their frauds in cyberspace.
On the defensive side of things, cyberspace is becoming less secure
even as security technologies improve. There are many reasons for this
seemingly paradoxical phenomenon, but they can all be traced back to
the problem of complexity. As I have said elsewhere [5], complexity is
the worst enemy of security. The reasons are complex and can get very
technical, but I can give you a flavor of the rationale: Complex
systems have more lines of code and therefore more security bugs.
Complex systems have more interactions and therefore more potential for
insecurities. Complex systems are harder to test and therefore are more
likely to have untested portions. Complex systems are harder to design
securely, implement securely, configure securely, and use securely.
Complex systems are harder for users to understand. Everything about
complexity leads towards lower security. As our computers and networks
become more complex, they inherently become less secure.
Another trend is the ineffectiveness of security products. This is
not due to failures in technology, but more to failures of
configuration and use. As amazing as it seems, the vast majority of
security products are simply not implemented in ways that are
effective. The blame could be laid on the products themselves, which
are too hard to use. The blame could be laid on the system
administrators, who often install security products without thinking
too much about them. But the real blame is in the culture: security
simply isn't a priority in most organizations. Security is routinely
ignored, bypassed, or paid lip service to. Products are purchased
because an organization wants to pass an audit or avoid litigation, but
much less attention is paid to how they are used. It's as if a
homeowner bought an expensive door lock and installed it in a way that
didn't provide any security.
Along similar lines, the quality of software security is abysmal.
Products routinely ship with hundreds or thousands of security
vulnerabilities. Again, there are technical reasons for this. As a
science, computer security is still in its infancy. We don't know, for
example, how to write secure software. We have some tricks, and we know
how to avoid some obvious problems, but we have no scientific theory of
security. It's still a black art and, although we're learning all the
time, we have a long way to go. But again, the real reason is that
security isn't a priority for software vendors. It's far better for a
company if they ship an insecure product a year earlier than a more
secure product a year later.
The result of these trends is that security technologies are
improving slowly, not nearly fast enough to keep up with the new
insecurities brought about by the increasing complexity of systems.
Every year brings more new attacks, faster-spreading worms, and more
damaging malicious code. Software products--operating systems as well
as applications software--continue to have more and more
vulnerabilities. As long as the trends of increasing complexity and
security's low priority continue, cyberspace will continue to become
less secure.
Complexity is something we can't change. The only thing we can
change is to make security a higher priority.
Cyberterrorism or ``Digital Pearl Harbor''
There is one often-discussed trend that I do not see: the rise of
cyberterrorism [6]. An essay I wrote on this issue is included as
Attachment #1. I believe that fears about cyberterrorism, or the
likelihood of a ``Digital Pearl Harbor,'' are largely the result of
companies and organizations wanting to stoke the fears of people and of
the news media looking for sensationalist stories. Real terrorism--
attacking the physical world via the Internet--is much harder than most
people think, and the effects of cyber attacks are far less terrorizing
than might seem at first. Cyberterrorism is simply not a problem that
we have to worry about.
This does not mean that large-scale cyberspace threats are not a
problem. A single vulnerability in a widely used software product can
affect millions, and an attack that exploits that vulnerability can do
millions of dollars of damage overnight. Attacks against popular
Internet services, or critical information services that use the
Internet to move data around, can affect millions.
While people overplay the risks of cyberterrorism, they underplay
the risks of cyber-crime. Today credit card numbers are no longer being
stolen one at a time out of purses and wallets; they're being stolen by
the millions out of databases. Internet fraud is big business, and it's
getting bigger.
And someday, cyberterrorism will become a real threat. Technology,
especially technology related to cyberspace, is fast-moving and its
effects are far-reaching. Just as some unknown attacker used the
physical mail system to spread the anthrax virus, it is certainly
possible that, someday, a terrorist may figure out how to kill large
numbers of people via the Internet. But that day is not coming soon,
and even then the same terrorist would probably have a much easier time
killing the same number of people in a physical attack.
The Resilience of the Internet
Despite all of these risks, the Internet is reasonably safe from a
catastrophic collapse. As insecure as each individual component or
network that makes up the Internet is, as a whole it is surprisingly
resilient. Often I have joked that the Internet ``just barely works,''
that it is constantly being revised and upgraded, and that it's a minor
miracle that it functions at all.
The Internet has seen examples of what many people have in mind
when they think about large-scale attacks or terrorism, only they've
been the result of accidents rather than maliciousness. Telephone
switching stations shut down as the result of a software bug, leaving
millions without telephone service. Communications satellites
temporarily malfunctioned, disabling a nationwide pager network. On 9/
11, the World Trade Center fell on much of lower Manhattan's
communications network. What we've learned from these episodes is that
the effects are not devastating and they're only temporary;
communications can be quickly restored, and people adapt until they are
restored.
Additionally, random events are still much more damaging than
malicious actions. In the closest example of a cyberterrorist attack
we've experienced, Vitek Boden hacked into a computer network and
released a million liters of pollution into an Australian estuary. His
damage was cleaned up in a week. A couple of months later, a bird
landed on a transformer in the Ohio River valley, causing it to blow
up; this set off a chain reaction that released about ten times as much
sewage into the river. The cleanup was much more expensive and took
significantly longer. Even today, random birds can do significantly
more damage than the concerted effort of someone intent on damage.
Security and Risk Management
Companies manage risks. They manage all sorts of risks; cyber risks
are just one more. And there are many different ways to manage risks. A
company might choose to mitigate the risk with technology or with
procedures. A company might choose to insure itself against the risk,
or to accept the risk itself. The methods a company chooses in a
particular situation depend on the details of that situation. And
failures happen regularly; many companies manage their risks
improperly, pay for their mistakes, and then soldier on. Companies,
too, are remarkably resilient.
To take a concrete example, consider a physical store and the risk
of shoplifting. Most grocery stores accept the risk as a cost of doing
business. Clothing stores might put tags on their garments and sensors
at the doorways; they mitigate the risk with technology. A jewelry
store might mitigate the risk through procedures: all merchandise stays
locked up, customers are not allowed to handle anything unattended,
etc. And that same jewelry store will carry theft insurance, another
risk management tool.
An appreciation of risk management is fundamental to understanding
how businesses approach computer security. Ask any network
administrator what he needs cybersecurity for, and he can describe the
threats: Web site defacements, corruption and loss of data due to
network penetrations, denial-of-service attacks, viruses, and Trojans.
The list of threats seems endless, and they're all real. Ask senior
management about cybersecurity, and you'll get a very different answer.
He'll talk about return on investment. He'll talk about risks. And
while the cyber threats are great, the risks are much less so. What
businesses need is adequate security at a reasonable cost.
Given the current state of affairs, businesses probably spend about
the right amount on security. The threats are real and the attacks are
frequent, but most of the time they're minor annoyances. Serious
attacks are rare. Internet epidemics are rare. And on the other side of
the coin, computer security products are often far less effective than
advertised. Technology changes quickly, and it's hard to mitigate risks
in such a rapidly changing environment. It is often more cost effective
to weather the ill effects of bad security than to spend significant
money trying to improve the level of security.
Externalities and Our Critical Infrastructure
If companies are so good at risk management, why not just let them
manage their own risks? Companies can decide whether or not to have a
guard in their corporate offices, install an alarm system in their
warehouses, or buy kidnapping insurance for their key executives.
Shouldn't we simply let companies make their own security decisions
based on their own security risks? If they don't care whether they buy
and use insecure software, if they don't bother installing security
products correctly, if they don't implement good cybersecurity
policies, why is that anyone else's problem? If they decide that it's
cheaper to weather all the Internet attacks than it is to improve their
own security, isn't it their own business?
The flaw in that argument is the reason this hearing was convened:
the ancillary threats facing our nation's critical infrastructure. The
risks to that infrastructure are greater than the sum of the risks to
the individual companies. We need to protect ourselves against attack
from an enemy military. We need to protect ourselves against a future
where cyberterrorists may target our electronic infrastructure. We need
to protect the underlying economic confidence in the Internet as a
mechanism for commerce. We need to protect the Internet above the risks
to individual pieces of it. Companies are good at risk management, but
they're only going to consider their own risks; the ancillary risks to
our critical infrastructure will not be taken into account.
One easy example is credit card numbers. Company databases are
regularly broken into and credit card numbers are stolen, sometimes
hundreds of thousands at a time. Companies work to secure those
databases, but not very hard, because most of the risk isn't shouldered
by those companies. When an individual finds that his credit card
number has been stolen and used fraudulently or, even worse, that his
entire identity has been stolen and used fraudulently, cleaning up the
mess can take considerable time and money. The company secures the
database based on its own internal risk; it does not secure the
database based on the aggregate risk of all the individuals whose
information it stores.
Software security is another example. Software vendors do some
security testing on their products, but it's minimal because most of
the risk isn't their problem. When a vulnerability is discovered in a
software product, the vendor fixes the problem and issues a patch. This
costs some money, and there's some bad publicity. The real risk is
shouldered by the companies and individuals who purchased and used the
product, and that risk doesn't affect the vendor nearly as much. When
the SQL Slammer worm spread across the Internet in January 2003,
worldwide losses were calculated in the tens of billions of dollars.
But the losses to Microsoft, whose software contained the vulnerability
that the Slammer used in the first place, were much, much less. Because
most of the risks to Microsoft are ancillary, security isn't nearly as
high a priority for them as it should be.
This brings us to the fundamental problem of cybersecurity: It
needs to be improved, but those who can improve it--the companies that
build computer hardware and write computer software, and the people and
companies that own and administer the small networks that make up the
Internet--are not motivated to do so.
More specifically: Our computers and networks are insecure, and
there every reason to believe that they will become less secure in the
future. The threats and risks are significant, and there is every
reason to believe that they will become more significant in the future.
But at the same time, because much of the risks are ancillary, software
and hardware manufacturers don't spend a lot of money improving the
security of their products and private network owners don't spend a lot
of money buying and installing security products on their networks.
In economics, an externality is an effect of a decision that is not
part of the decision process. Most pollution, for example, is an
externality. A factory makes an economic decision about the amount of
pollution it dumps into a river based on its own economic motivations;
the health of the people living downstream is an externality. A welfare
mother makes a decision whether to marry someone or live with him
without marriage partly based on the economics of the welfare system;
the societal degradation of the institution of marriage is an
externality. Ancillary cyberrisks are an example of an externality.
There are several ways to deal with externalities. They can be
regulated through a legal system: Laws and regulations which prohibit
certain actions and mandate others are a way to manage externalities.
They can be internalized through taxation or liabilities, both of which
provide economic incentives to take externalities into account.
Sometimes societal norms modify externalities. And so on. The
particular mechanism chosen will depend on politics, but the overall
goal is to bring the various externalities into the decision process.
I believe that externalities are the fundamental problem of
cybersecurity. The security of a particular piece of the Internet may
be good enough for the organization controlling that piece, but the
external effects of that ``good enough'' security may not be good
enough for the nation as a whole. Our nation's critical infrastructure
is becoming more and more dependent on a secure and functioning
Internet, but there's no one organization in charge of keeping the
Internet secure and functioning. Our software has very poor security,
and there is no real incentive to make it better. We are increasingly
vulnerable to attacks that affect everyone a little bit, but that no
one has enough incentive to fix.
Recommendations
This fundamental problem of cybersecurity is much more an economic
one than a technical one. Our nation's computer infrastructure could be
much more secure if the business incentives were there to make it so--
if the externalities were internalized, so to speak. Asking companies
to improve their own security won't work. (We've tried this repeatedly;
it's doomed to failure.) Trying to build a separate government network
won't work. (The whole point of cyberspace is that it is one large
interconnected network.) Hoping technology will improve won't work. (It
doesn't matter how good the technology is if people don't want to use
it.)
The basic capitalist and democratic business process is capable of
improving cybersecurity, but only if the proper incentives are in
place. My general recommendation is that you pass laws and implement
regulations designed to deal with the externalities in cybersecurity
decisions so that organizations are motivated to provide a higher level
of security--one that is commensurate with the threat against our
nation's critical infrastructure--and then step back and let the
mechanisms of commercial innovation work to solve the problems and
improve security. Specifically:
1. Stop trying to find consensus. Over the years, we have seen
several government cyberspace security plans and strategies come out of
the White House, the most recent one this year [7]. These documents all
suffer from an inability to risk offending any industry. In the most
recent strategy, for example, preliminary drafts included strong words
about wireless insecurity that were removed at the request of the
wireless industry, which didn't want to look bad for not doing anything
about it. A recommendation that ISPs provide personal firewalls to all
of their users was likewise removed, because the large ISPs didn't want
to look bad for not already providing such a security feature. Unlike
many other governmental processes, security is harmed by consensus.
Cybersecurity requires hard choices. These choices will necessarily
come at the expense of some industries and some special interests. As
long as the government is unwilling to move counter to the interests of
some of its corporate constituents, huge insecurities will remain.
2. Expose computer hardware, software, and networks to liabilities.
I have written extensively about the effect of liabilities on the
computer industry [8]; one of my essays is included as Attachment #2.
The major reason companies don't worry about the externalities of their
security decisions--the effects of their insecure products and networks
on others--is that there is no real liability for their actions.
Liability will immediately change the cost/benefit equation for
companies, because they will have to bear financial responsibility for
ancillary risks borne by others as a result of their actions. With
liabilities firmly in place, the best interests of software vendors,
and the best interests of their shareholders, will be served by them
spending the time and money necessary to make their products secure
before release. The best interests of corporations, and the best
interests of their shareholders, will be served by them spending the
time and money necessary to secure their own networks. The insurance
industry will step in and force companies to improve their own security
if they want liability coverage at a reasonable price. Liability is a
common capitalistic mechanism to deal with externalities, and it will
do more to secure our nation's critical infrastructure than any other
action.
3. Secure your own networks. Fund programs to secure government
networks, both internal networks and publicly accessible networks. Only
buy secure hardware and software products. Before worrying about the
security of everyone else, get your own house in order. This does not
mean that it's necessary to redo what is already being done in
industry. The government is a consumer of computer products, like any
large corporation. The government does not need to develop its own
security products; everyone's security is better served if the
government buys commercial products. The government does not need to
create its own organization to identify and analyze cyber threats; it
is better off using the same commercial organizations that corporations
use. The threats against government are the same as the threats against
everyone else, and the solutions are the same. The U.S. government,
specifically the Department of Homeland Security, should use and
improve the resources that are available to everyone, since everyone
needs those same resources.
4. Use your buying power to drive an increase in security. U.S.
government procurement can be a potent tool to drive research and
development. If you demand more secure products, companies will
deliver. Standardize on a few good security products, and continually
force them to improve. There's a ``rising tide'' effect that will
happen; once companies deliver products to the increasingly demanding
specifications of the government, the same products will be made
available to private organizations as well. The U.S. government is an
enormous consumer of computer hardware, software, systems, and
services. And because you're using the same commercial products that
everyone else uses, those products will improve to the benefit of
everyone. The money you spend on your own security will benefit
everyone's security.
5. Invest in security research; invest in security education. As
the market starts demanding real security, companies will need to
figure out how to supply it. Research and education are critical to
improving the security of computers and networks. Here again, use your
financial muscle to improve security for everyone. Research and
education in this important field need to be increased. The benefits
will be beyond anything we can imagine today.
6. Rationally prosecute cybercriminals. In our society, we rarely
solve security problems by technical means alone. We don't wear body
armor or live in fortresses. Instead, we rely on the legal system to
rationally prosecute criminals and act as a deterrent to future crimes.
We need to beef up law enforcement to deal with real computer crimes.
This does not mean charging sixteen-year-old kids as adults for what
are basically 21st century pranks; this means going after those who
commit real crimes on the Internet.
Conclusion
None of this is easy. Every computer company you bring into this
room will tell you that liabilities will be bad for their industry. Of
course they're going to tell you that; it's in their best interests not
to be responsible for their own actions. The Department of Homeland
Security will tell you that they need money for this and that massive
government security program. Of course they're going to tell you that;
it's in their best interests to get as large a budget as they can. The
FBI is going to tell you that extreme penalties are necessary for the
current crop of teenage cyberterrorists; they're trying to make the
problem seem more dire than it really is to improve their own image. If
you're going to help improve the security of our nation, you're going
to have to look past everyone's individual self-interests toward the
best interests of everyone.
Our nation's cybersecurity risks are greater than those of any
individual corporation or government organization, and the only way to
manage those risks is to address them directly. I strongly recommend
that you put the interests of our nation's cybersecurity above the
interests of individual corporations or government organizations. The
externalities of rational corporate cybersecurity decisions are hurting
us all. It's the job of government to look at the big picture and the
needs of society as a whole, and then to properly motivate individuals
to satisfy those needs.
Thank you for the opportunity to appear before your committee
today. I would be pleased to answer any questions.
References
[1] Bruce Schneier, Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked
World, John Wiley & Sons, 2000.
[2] Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an
Uncertain World, Copernicus Books, 2003.
[3] Computer Security Institute, ``2003 CSI/FBI Computer Crime and
Security Survey,'' 2003. http://www.gocsi.com/press/20030528.html
[4] Honeynet Project, :Know Your Enemy: Statistics,'' 22 July, 2001.
http://www.honeynet.org/papers/stats/
[5] Bruce Schneier, ``Software Complexity and Security,'' Crypto-Gram,
March 15, 2000. http://www.counterpane.com./crypto-gram-0003.html
[6] Bruce Schneier, ``The Risks of Cyberterrorism,'' Crypto-Gram, June
15, 2003. http://www.counterpane.com./crypto-gram-0306.html
[7] White House, National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, Feb 2003.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/pcipb/cyberspace--strategy.pdf
[8] Bruce Schneier, ``Liability and Security,'' Crypto-Gram, April 15,
2002. http://www.counterpane.com./crypto-gram-0204.html
ATTACHMENT #1
The Risks of Cyberterrorism
Bruce Schneier
Reprinted from: Crypto-Gram, June 15, 2003.
http://www.counterpane.com./crypto-gram-0306.html
The threat of cyberterrorism is causing much alarm these days. We have
been told to expect attacks since 9/11; that cyberterrorists would try
to cripple our power system, disable air traffic control and emergency
services, open dams, or disrupt banking and communications. But so far,
nothing's happened. Even during the war in Iraq, which was supposed to
increase the risk dramatically, nothing happened. The impending
cyberwar was a big dud. Don't congratulate our vigilant security,
though; the alarm was caused by a misunderstanding of both the
attackers and the attacks.
These attacks are very difficult to execute. The software systems
controlling our nation's infrastructure are filled with
vulnerabilities, but they're generally not the kinds of vulnerabilities
that cause catastrophic disruptions. The systems are designed to limit
the damage that occurs from errors and accidents. They have manual
overrides. These systems have been proven to work; they've experienced
disruptions caused by accident and natural disaster. We've been through
blackouts, telephone switch failures, and disruptions of air traffic
control computers. In 1999, a software bug knocked out a nationwide
paging system for a day. The results might be annoying, and engineers
might spend days or weeks scrambling, but the effect on the general
population has been minimal.
The worry is that a terrorist would cause a problem more serious than a
natural disaster, but this kind of thing is surprisingly hard to do.
Worms and viruses have caused all sorts of network disruptions, but it
happened by accident. In January 2003, the SQL Slammer worm disrupted
13,000 ATMs on the Bank of America's network. But before it happened,
you couldn't have found a security expert who understood that those
systems were dependent on that vulnerability. We simply don't
understand the interactions well enough to predict which kinds of
attacks could cause catastrophic results, and terrorist organizations
don't have that sort of knowledge either--even if they tried to hire
experts.
The closest example we have of this kind of thing comes from
Australia in 2000. Vitek Boden broke into the computer network of a
sewage treatment plant along Australia's Sunshine Coast. Over the
course of two months, he leaked hundreds of thousands of gallons of
putrid sludge into nearby rivers and parks. Among the results were
black creek water, dead marine life, and a stench so unbearable that
residents complained. This is the only known case of someone hacking a
digital control system with the intent of causing environmental harm.
Despite our predilection for calling anything ``terrorism,'' these
attacks are not. We know what terrorism is. It's someone blowing
himself up in a crowded restaurant, or flying an airplane into a
skyscraper. It's not infecting computers with viruses, forcing air
traffic controllers to route planes manually, or shutting down a pager
network for a day. That causes annoyance and irritation, not terror.
This is a difficult message for some, because these days anyone who
causes widespread damage is being given the label ``terrorist.'' But
imagine for a minute the leadership of al Qaeda sitting in a cave
somewhere, plotting the next move in their jihad against the United
States. One of the leaders jumps up and exclaims: ``I have an idea!
We'll disable their e-mail....'' Conventional terrorism--driving a
truckful of explosives into a nuclear power plant, for example--is
still easier and much more effective.
There are lots of hackers in the world--kids, mostly--who like to
play at politics and dress their own antics in the trappings of
terrorism. They hack computers belonging to some other country
(generally not government computers) and display a political message.
We've often seen this kind of thing when two countries squabble: China
vs. Taiwan, India vs. Pakistan, England vs. Ireland, U.S. vs. China
(during the 2001 crisis over the U.S. spy plane that crashed in Chinese
territory), the U.S. and Israel vs. various Arab countries. It's the
equivalent of soccer hooligans taking out national frustrations on
another country's fans at a game. It's base and despicable, and it
causes real damage, but it's cyberhooliganism, not cyberterrorism.
There are several organizations that track attacks over the
Internet. Over the last six months, less than 1% of all attacks
originated from countries on the U.S. government's Cyber Terrorist
Watch List, while 35% originated from inside the United States.
Computer security is still important. People overplay the risks of
cyberterrorism, but they underplay the risks of cybercrime. Fraud and
espionage are serious problems. Luckily, the same countermeasures aimed
at cyberterrorists will also prevent hackers and criminals. If
organizations secure their computer networks for the wrong reasons, it
will still be the right thing to do.
ATTACHMENT #2
Liability and Security
Bruce Schneier
Reprinted from: Crypto-Gram, April 15, 2002.http://
www.counterpane.com./crypto-gram-0204.html
Today, computer security is at a crossroads. It's failing,
regularly, and with increasingly serious results. I believe it will
improve eventually. In the near term, the consequences of insecurity
will get worse before they get better. And when they get better, the
improvement will be slow and will be met with considerable resistance.
The engine of this improvement will be liability--holding software
manufacturers accountable for the security and, more generally, the
quality of their products--and the timetable for improvement depends
wholly on how quickly security liability permeates cyberspace.
Network security is not a problem that technology can solve.
Security has a technological component, but businesses approach
security as they do any other business risk: in terms of risk
management. Organizations optimize their activities to minimize their
cost * risk product, and understanding those motivations is key to
understanding computer security today.
For example, most organizations don't spend a lot of money on
network security. Why? Because the costs are significant: time,
expense, reduced functionality, frustrated end users. On the other
hand, the costs of ignoring security and getting hacked are small: the
possibility of bad press and angry customers, maybe some network
downtime, none of which is permanent. And there's some regulatory
pressure, from audits or lawsuits, that add additional costs. The
result: a smart organization does what everyone else does, and no more.
The same economic reasoning explains why software vendors don't
spend a lot of effort securing their products. The costs of adding good
security are significant--large expenses, reduced functionality,
delayed product releases, annoyed users--while the costs of ignoring
security are minor: occasional bad press, and maybe some users
switching to competitors' products. Any smart software vendor will talk
big about security, but do as little as possible.
Think about why firewalls succeeded in the marketplace. It's not
because they're effective; most firewalls are installed so poorly as
not to be effective, and there are many more effective security
products that have never seen widespread deployment. Firewalls are
ubiquitous because auditors started demanding firewalls. This changed
the cost equation for businesses. The cost of adding a firewall was
expense and user annoyance, but the cost of not having a firewall was
failing an audit. And even worse, a company without a firewall could be
accused of not following industry best practices in a lawsuit. The
result: everyone has a firewall, whether it does any good or not.
Network security is a business problem, and the only way to fix it
is to concentrate on the business motivations. We need to change the
costs; security needs to affect an organization's bottom line in an
obvious way. In order to improve computer security, the CEO must care.
In order for the CEO to care, it must affect the stock price and the
shareholders.
I have a three-step program towards improving computer and network
security. None of the steps have anything to do with the technology;
they all have to do with businesses, economics, and people.
Step one: enforce liabilities. This is essential. Today there are
no real consequences for having bad security, or having low-quality
software of any kind. In fact, the marketplace rewards low quality.
More precisely, it rewards early releases at the expense of almost all
quality. If we expect CEOs to spend significant resources on security--
especially the security of their customers--they must be liable for
mishandling their customers' data. If we expect software vendors to
reduce features, lengthen development cycles, and invest in secure
software development processes, they must be liable for security
vulnerabilities in their products.
Legislatures could impose liability on the computer industry, by
forcing software manufacturers to live with the same product liability
laws that affect other industries. If software manufacturers produced a
defective product, they would be liable for damages. Even without this,
courts could start imposing liability-like penalties on software
manufacturers and users. This is starting to happen. A U.S. judge
forced the Department of Interior to take its network offline, because
it couldn't guarantee the safety of American Indian data it was
entrusted with. Several cases have resulted in penalties against
companies who used customer data in violation of their privacy
promises, or who collected that data using misrepresentation or fraud.
And judges have issued restraining orders against companies with
insecure networks that are used as conduits for attacks against others.
However it happens, liability changes everything. Currently, there
is no reason for a software company not to offer more features, more
complexity. Liability forces software companies to think twice before
changing something. Liability forces companies to protect the data
they're entrusted with.
Step two: allow parties to transfer liabilities. This will happen
automatically, because this is what insurance companies do. The
insurance industry turns variable-cost risks into fixed expenses.
They're going to move into cyber-insurance in a big way. And when they
do, they're going to drive the computer security industry. . .just like
they drive the security industry in the brick-and-mortar world.
A company doesn't buy security for its warehouse--strong locks,
window bars, or an alarm system--because it makes it feel safe. It buys
that security because its insurance rates go down. The same thing will
hold true for computer security. Once enough policies are being
written, insurance companies will start charging different premiums for
different levels of security. Even without legislated liability, the
CEO will start noticing how his insurance rates change. And once the
CEO starts buying security products based on his insurance premiums,
the insurance industry will wield enormous power in the marketplace.
They will determine which security products are ubiquitous, and which
are ignored. And since the insurance companies pay for the actual
liability, they have a great incentive to be rational about risk
analysis and the effectiveness of security products.
And software companies will take notice, and will increase security
in order to make the insurance for their products affordable.
Step three: provide mechanisms to reduce risk. This will happen
automatically, and be entirely market driven, because it's what the
insurance industry wants. Moreover, they want it done in standard
models that they can build policies around. They're going to look to
security processes: processes of secure software development before
systems are released, and processes of protection, detection, and
response for corporate networks and systems. And more and more, they're
going to look towards outsourced services.
The insurance industry prefers security outsourcing, because they
can write policies around those services. It's much easier to design
insurance around a standard set of security services delivered by an
outside vendor than it is to customize a policy for each individual
network.
Actually, this isn't a three-step program. It's a one-step program
with two inevitable consequences. Enforce liability, and everything
else will flow from it. It has to.
Much of Internet security is a common: an area used by a community
as a whole. Like all commons, keeping it working benefits everyone, but
any individual can benefit from exploiting it. (Think of the criminal
justice system in the real world.) In our society we protect our
commons--our environment, healthy working conditions, safe food and
drug practices, lawful streets, sound accounting practices--by
legislating those goods and by making companies liable for taking undue
advantage of those commons. This kind of thinking is what gives us
bridges that don't collapse, clean air and water, and sanitary
restaurants. We don't live in a ``buyer beware'' society; we hold
companies liable for taking advantage of buyers.
There's no reason to treat software any differently from other
products. Today Firestone can produce a tire with a single systemic
flaw and they're liable, but Microsoft can produce an operating system
with multiple systemic flaws discovered per week and not be liable.
This makes no sense, and it's the primary reason security is so bad
today.
Mr. Thornberry. And before turning to the next witness, let
me thank the distinguished chairman of the Science Committee
for allowing us the use of your facilities. As we continue to
be homeless, we appreciate the chairman's generosity.
Our next witness is Richard Pethia, Director of CERT
Centers, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon
University. CERT provides the central response and coordination
facility for global information security instant response and
countermeasures for cyber threats and vulnerabilities since
1988. We appreciate you being with us, sir. Your full statement
will also be made a part of the record, and please summarize it
as you would like.
STATEMENT OF RICHARD D. PETHIA
Mr. Pethia. First, thank you, Mr. Chairman, members of the
subcommittee, for the opportunity to testify on cybersecurity
issues. It is something that we in Pittsburgh have been working
on for a number of years and feel very passionate about.
The current state of Internet security from our perspective
is cause for concern. Security issues are not well understood.
They are rarely given high priority by many software
developers, vendors, network managers or consumers. At the same
time, however, computers have become such an integral part of
American government and business operation, that computer-
related risk can no longer be separated from national defense,
general safety, health, business and privacy risks.
We are increasingly dependent on our computers and the
networks that hook them together, or planes won't fly, freight
won't ship, oil won't pump, the things that--the physical
things in our lives are as critically dependent on these
systems are as things like financial transactions and business
transactions that we all recognize.
The data that we have and data from other groups in the
security field indicates that the attacks are going up year
after year. The damage is increasing, and that is happening
even while government and the industry are actually investing
increasing amounts of money to deal with the problem.
There are a number of factors that contribute to this
increased vulnerability. First of all, we are connecting
everything to everything else. For many good business reasons,
we are connecting more and more of our systems to the Internet.
The phone system, the Internet, are merging and we are building
a communications fabric where everything is tied together. And
a number of systems, where once secure because of their
isolation, are now insecure because they are connected to this
web of computing that we have constructed.
Cyberspace and physical space are becoming one. Supervisory
control and data acquisition systems that control power grids,
water treatment and distribution plans, oil and chemical
refineries, other physical processes, are being linked to
communications links in the Internet, and these systems are
becoming potential targets of individuals bent on causing
massive disruption and physical damage.
Engineering for ease of use is driving a dramatic increase
in the use of computers, but at the same time it is not been
matched by engineering for ease of secure administration. The
result is increasing numbers of vulnerable computers.
Comprehensive security solutions are lacking. Engineering the
security of a large complex system is often more difficult than
engineering the system itself, and many organizations just
don't have the skills.
The Internet at the same time has become a virtual breeding
ground for attackers. Intruders share information about
vulnerable sites, about vulnerabilities in technology and
attack tools. Internet attacks are difficult to trace, and the
protocols make it easy for attackers to hide their true
identity and location.
With all these factors, there are two others that I think
are especially important to focus on. One is vulnerabilities in
the information technology products in the market today.
Last year we received reports of over 4,000 separate new
vulnerabilities. Weaknesses in products that an attacker can
exploit compromise a system. Some of these are deep-seated and
are likely to be long-lived, in that they are the result of
architecture and design decisions that were made early in the
product's development cycle, not decisions that can be changed
easily.
Others are the result of weak implementation in testing
practices, bugs in the program. They can be quickly corrected.
However, both of these require that system operators take
action to protect their systems, and with so many of these
problems being found every year, it is placing the system
operators in a very hard spot. They have got a major challenge.
The second major rea of vulnerability includes weakness in
the management and operational practice of the system operators
themselves. Typical problems include things like poor or
ambiguous security policies, lack of security training for all
levels of staff, poor account and access management, poor
physical security, leading to open access to critical devices,
lack of vulnerability management practices and lack of
monitoring or auditing to detect security weaknesses and
attacks.
Putting these practices in place requires senior management
understanding and commitment, and that is a condition that is
still missing in many organizations. Working our way out of
this vulnerable position will require a multipronged approach.
First, hire quality products. Good software engineering
practices can dramatically improve our ability to withstand
attacks. We need operating systems and other products that are
virtually virus-proof. We need to reduce the implementation
errors that we have by at least two orders of magnitude, and we
need to have vendors ship products with high security default
configurations.
We encourage the government to use its buying power to
demand such high-quality software. Acquisition processes must
be in place with more emphasis on security characteristics and
perhaps the use of code integrity clauses that hold vendors
more accountable for defects in their release products.
Acquisition professionals should be trained in government
security regulations and policies and also in the fundamentals
of security concepts and architectures.
Also needed is wider adoption of security practices. Senior
management must be accountable for the use of the technology in
their operation, and they must provide visible endorsement of
security improvement efforts and the resources needed to
implement those required improvements.
And in the long term, research has to be an essential
component of the answer. We need a unified and integrated
framework for all information assurance analysis that leads to
a new generation of products that are fundamentally more secure
than those we have today. We need more rigorous methods to
assess and manage risks and quantitative techniques to help us
understand the cost/benefit analysis of doing that risk
mitigation, along with simulation tools to analyze the cascade
effects of attacks, accidents, and failures across our
interdependent systems.
We as a Nation need more qualified technical specialists.
The government scholarship programs that are in place need to
be expanded over the next 5 years to build an infrastructure
that will meet the long-term needs of trained security
professionals, and also needed is more awareness and security
training for all Internet and technology users.
So in conclusion, the incidents are almost doubling every
year, and the attack technology will evolve to support attacks
that are even more virulent and damaging. We can make
significant progress by making changes in our software design
and development practices, giving more management support to
risk management activities, increasing the number of trained
system managers and administrators, and increasing research in
the secure and survivable systems. Thank you.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you. Appreciate it.
[The statement of Mr. Pethia follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF RICHARD D. PETHIA
1. Introduction
Mr. Chairman and members of the Subcommittee: My name is Rich Pethia. I
am the director of the CERT Centers, part of the Software Engineering
Institute, a federally funded research and development center operated
by Carnegie Mellon University. We have 14 years of experience with
computer and network security. The CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC)
was established in 1988, after an Internet ``worm'' became the first
Internet security incident to make headline news, acting as a wake-up
call for network security. In response, the CERT/CC was established at
the SEI. The center was activated in just two weeks, and we have worked
hard to maintain our ability to react quickly. The CERT/CC staff has
handled well over 200,000 incidents and cataloged more than 8,000
computer vulnerabilities.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify on cyber security problem.
Today I will discuss the vulnerability of information technology on the
Internet and steps I believe we must take to better protect our
critical systems from future attacks.
The current state of Internet security is cause for concern.
Vulnerabilities associated with the Internet put users at risk.
Security measures that were appropriate for mainframe computers and
small, well-defined networks inside an organization are not effective
for the Internet, a complex, dynamic world of interconnected networks
with no clear boundaries and no central control. Security issues are
often not well understood and are rarely given high priority by many
software developers, vendors, network managers, or consumers.
Government, commercial, and educational organizations depend on
computers to such an extent that day-to-day operations are
significantly hindered when the computers are ``down.'' Currently many
of the day-to-day operations depend upon connections to the Internet,
and new connections are continuously being made to the Internet. Use of
the Internet enhances the ability of organizations to conduct their
activities in a cost-effective and efficient way. However, along with
increased capability and dependence comes increased vulnerability. It
is easy to exploit the many security holes in the Internet and in the
software commonly used in conjunction with it; and it is easy to
disguise or hide the true origin and identity of the people doing the
exploiting. Moreover, the Internet is easily accessible to anyone with
a computer and a network connection. Individuals and organizations
worldwide can reach any point on the network without regard to national
or geographic boundaries.
Computers have become such an integral part of American business and
government that computer-related risks cannot be separated from general
business, health, and privacy risks. Valuable government and business
assets are now at risk over the Internet. For example, customer and
personnel information may be exposed to intruders. Financial data,
intellectual property, and strategic plans may be at risk. The
widespread use of databases leaves the privacy of individuals at risk.
Increased use of computers in safety-critical applications, including
the storage and processing of medical records data, increases the
chance that accidents or attacks on computer systems can cost people
their lives.
Techniques that have worked in the past for securing isolated systems
are not effective in the world of unbounded networks, mobile computing,
distributed applications, and dynamic computing that we live in today.
Today there is rapid movement toward increased use of interconnected
networks for a broad range of activities, including commerce,
education, entertainment, operation of government, and supporting the
delivery of health and other human services. Although this trend
promises many benefits, it also poses many risks. In short,
interconnections are rapidly increasing and opportunities to exploit
vulnerabilities in the interconnected systems are increasing as well.
2. Key Factors in the Current State of Internet Security
The current state of Internet security is the result of many factors. A
change in any one of these can change the level of Internet security
and survivability.
We are connecting everything with everything else. Because of
the dramatically lower cost of communication and ease of connecting to
the Internet, use of the Internet is replacing other forms of
electronic communication. As critical infrastructure operators strive
to improve their efficiency and lower costs, they are connecting
formerly isolated systems to the Internet to facilitate remote
maintenance functions and improve coordination across distributed
systems. Operations of the critical infrastructures are becoming
increasingly dependent on the Internet and are vulnerable to Internet
based attacks.
Cyber space and physical space are becoming one. Most
threatening of all is the link between cyber space and physical space.
Supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and other
forms of networked computer systems have for years been used to control
power grids, gas and oil distribution pipelines, water treatment and
distribution systems, hydroelectric and flood control dams, oil and
chemical refineries, and other physical systems. Increasingly, these
control systems are being connected to communications links and
networks to reduce operational costs by supporting remote maintenance,
remote control, and remote update functions. These computer-controlled
and network-connected systems are potential targets of individuals bent
on causing massive disruption and physical damage. This is not just
theory; actual attacks have caused major operational problems. Attacks
against wastewater treatment systems in Australia, for example, led to
the release of hundreds of thousands of gallons of sludge.
There is a continuing movement to distributed, client-server,
and heterogeneous configurations. As the technology is being
distributed, the management of the technology is often distributed as
well. In these cases, system administration and management often fall
upon people who do not have the training, skill, resources, or interest
needed to operate their systems securely.
The Internet is becoming increasingly complex and dynamic, but
among those connected to the Internet there is a lack of adequate
knowledge about the network and about security. The rush to the
Internet, coupled with a lack of understanding, is leading to the
exposure of sensitive data and risk to safety-critical systems.
Misconfigured or outdated operating systems, mail programs, and Web
sites result in vulnerabilities that intruders can exploit. Just one
naive user with an easy-to-guess password increases an organization's
risk.
There is little evidence of improvement in the security
features of most products; developers are not devoting sufficient
effort to apply lessons learned about the sources of vulnerabilities.
The CERT Coordination Center routinely receives reports of new
vulnerabilities. In 1995 we received an average of 35 new reports each
quarter, 140 for the year. By 2002, the number of annual reports
received had skyrocketed to over 4000. We continue to see the same
types of vulnerabilities in newer versions of products that we saw in
earlier versions. Technology evolves so rapidly that vendors
concentrate on time to market, often minimizing that time by placing a
low priority on security features. Until their customers demand
products that are more secure, the situation is unlikely to change.
When vendors release patches or upgrades to solve security
problems, organizations' systems often are not upgraded. The job may be
too time-consuming, too complex, or just at too low a priority for the
system administration staff to handle. With increased complexity comes
the introduction of more vulnerabilities, so solutions do not solve
problems for the long term--system maintenance is never-ending. Because
managers do not fully understand the risks, they neither give security
a high enough priority nor assign adequate resources. Exacerbating the
problem is the fact that the need for system administrators with strong
security skills far exceeds the supply.
Engineering for ease of use is not being matched by
engineering for ease of secure administration. Today's software
products, workstations, and personal computers bring the power of the
computer to increasing numbers of people who use that power to perform
their work more efficiently and effectively. Products are so easy to
use that people with little technical knowledge or skill can install
and operate them on their desktop computers. Unfortunately, it is
difficult to configure and operate many of these products securely.
This gap leads to increasing numbers of vulnerable systems.
As we face the complex and rapidly changing world of the
Internet, comprehensive solutions are lacking. Among security-conscious
organizations, there is increased reliance on ``silver bullet''
solutions, such as firewalls and encryption. The organizations that
have applied a ``silver bullet'' are lulled into a false sense of
security and become less vigilant, but single solutions applied once
are neither foolproof nor adequate. Solutions must be combined, and the
security situation must be constantly monitored as technology changes
and new exploitation techniques are discovered.
Compared with other critical infrastructures, the Internet
seems to be a virtual breeding ground for attackers. Although some
attacks seem playful (for example, students experimenting with the
capability of the network) and some are clearly malicious, all have the
potential of doing damage. Unfortunately, Internet attacks in general,
and denial-of-service attacks in particular, remain easy to accomplish,
hard to trace, and a low risk to the attacker. While some attacks
require technical knowledge--the equivalent to that of a college
graduate who majored in computer science--many other successful attacks
are carried out by technically unsophisticated intruders. Technically
competent intruders duplicate and share their programs and information
at little cost, thus enabling novice intruders to do the same damage as
the experts. In addition to being easy and cheap, Internet attacks can
be quick. In a matter of seconds, intruders can break into a system;
hide evidence of the break-in; install their programs, leaving a ``back
door'' so they can easily return to the now-compromised system; and
begin launching attacks at other sites.
Attackers can lie about their identity and location on the
network. Information on the Internet is transmitted in packets, each
containing information about the origin and destination. Senders
provide their return address, but they can lie about it. Most of the
Internet is designed merely to forward packets one step closer to their
destination with no attempt to make a record of their source. There is
not even a ``postmark'' to indicate generally where a packet
originated. It requires close cooperation among sites and up-to-date
equipment to trace malicious packets during an attack. Moreover, the
Internet is designed to allow packets to flow easily across
geographical, administrative, and political boundaries. Consequently,
cooperation in tracing a single attack may involve multiple
organizations and jurisdictions, most of which are not directly
affected by the attack and may have little incentive to invest time and
resources in the effort. This means that it is easy for an adversary to
use a foreign site to launch attacks at U.S. systems. The attacker
enjoys the added safety of the need for international cooperation in
order to trace the attack, compounded by impediments to legal
investigations. We have seen U.S.-based attacks on U.S. sites gain this
safety by first breaking into one or more non-U.S. sites before coming
back to attack the desired target in the U.S.
3. Categories of vulnerabilities
Protecting any complex system (hardware, software, people, and physical
plant) and insuring its successful operation in the face of attacks,
accidents and failures is a difficult task. Vulnerabilities (weaknesses
that can be exploited to compromise the operation of the system) can
creep into the system in a variety of areas. Deciding which
vulnerabilities really matter and effectively dealing with them, are
key steps in an organization's risk management process.
For discussion, it is useful to separate sources of vulnerability into
two major categories: weaknesses in the information technology (IT)
products as supplied by the vendor(s); and weakness in the ways
organizations manage and use the technology.
IT Product Vulnerabilities
As stated above, the number of vulnerabilities in IT products
discovered each year is increasing dramatically: from 140 reported to
the CERT/CC in 1995 to 4,129 reported in 2002. Each vulnerability
represents a weakness in a product that can be exploited in some way to
help an attacker achieve the objective of compromising a system.
Some of these vulnerabilities are deep-seated and difficult to
correct because they are the result of architecture and design
decisions that were made early in the product's development cycle (e.g.
operating system architectures that allow the unconstrained execution
of application software and thereby allow the easy propagation of
viruses). In these cases, the vulnerabilities can only be removed by
changing the basic architecture of the product. These types of
fundamental changes often have consequences that affect other aspects
of the product's operation. In some cases these side effects will cause
applications that inter-operate with the product to ``break'' (i.e. the
new version of the product is no longer compatible with earlier
versions and users may need to rewrite their applications). These types
of vulnerability are typically long-lived and product users must find
some other way to protect themselves from attacks that attempt to
exploit the vulnerability (e.g. invest in anti-virus software in order
to detect and remove viruses before they operate on the vulnerable
system).
Other vulnerabilities are easier to correct since they are the result
of low-level design decisions or implementation errors (bugs in the
programs). It is often that case that these types of vulnerability,
once discovered, can quickly be corrected by the vendor and the
corrections (oftentimes called ``patches'') made available to the
customers. However, even though the corrections may be available
quickly, it is not always the case that they can be deployed quickly.
System operators need to insure that the corrections do not have
unintended side-effects on their systems and typically test the
corrections before deployment. Also, in the case of a widely used
product, system operators must often update the software used in
thousands of computers to deploy the correction. This in itself is a
labor intensive and time consuming task.
In either case, IT product vulnerabilities are often long-lived with
many Internet connected systems vulnerable to a particular form of
attack many months after vendors produce corrections to the
vulnerability that was exploited by the attack.
Weaknesses in Management and Operational Practice
The second major category of vulnerability includes weaknesses in the
management and operational practices of system operators. Factors that
lead to weaknesses in operational practices include things like:
Lack of, ambiguous or poorly enforced organizational
security policies and regulations; security roles and
responsibilities that are not clearly defined or lack of
accountability
Failure to account for security when outsourcing IT
services
Lack of security awareness training for all levels of
staff
Poor account management or password management by all
users
Poor physical security leading to open access to
important computers and network devices
Weak configuration management practices that allow for
vulnerable configurations
Weak authentication practices that allow attackers to
masquerade as valid system users
Lack of vulnerability management practices that
require system administrators to quickly correct important
vulnerabilities
Failure to use strong encryption when transmitting
sensitive information over the network.
Lack of monitoring and auditing practices that can
detect attacker behavior before damage is done.
Weaknesses in any of these areas open the doors for attackers and give
them opportunities to take advantage of the weaknesses to achieve their
goals. Managing the risk associated with this category of vulnerability
requires that organizations dedicate resources to the risk management
task. Operations must be continuously assessed and corrective actions
taken when needed.
4. Recommended Actions
Working our way out of the vulnerable position we are in requires a
multi-pronged approach that helps us deal with the escalating near-term
problem while at the same time building stronger foundations for the
future. The work that must be done includes achieving these changes:
Higher quality information technology products with
security mechanisms that are better matched to the knowledge,
skills, and abilities of today's system managers,
administrators, and users
Wider adoption of risk analysis and risk management
policies and practices that help organizations identify their
critical security needs, assess their operations and systems
against those needs, and implement security improvements
identified through the assessment process
Expanded research programs that lead to fundamental
advances in computer security
A larger number of technical specialists who have the
skills needed to secure large, complex systems
Increased and ongoing awareness and understanding of
cyber-security issues, vulnerabilities, and threats by all
stakeholders in cyber space
Higher quality products: In today's Internet environment, a security
approach based on ``user beware'' is unacceptable. The systems are too
complex and the attacks happen too fast for this approach to work.
Fortunately, good software engineering practices can dramatically
improve our ability to withstand attacks. The solutions required are a
combination of the following:
Virus-resistant/virus-proof software--There is nothing
intrinsic about digital computers or software that makes them
vulnerable to viruses, which propagate and infect systems
because of design choices that have been made by computer and
software designers. Designs are susceptible to viruses and
their effects when they allow the import of executable code, in
one form or another, and allow the unconstrained execution of
that code on the machine that received it. Unconstrained
execution allows code developers to easily take full advantage
of a system's capabilities, but does so with the side effect of
making the system vulnerable to virus attack. To effectively
control viruses in the long term, vendors must provide systems
and software that constrain the execution of imported code,
especially code that comes from unknown or untrusted sources.
Some techniques to do this have been known for decades. Others,
such as ``sandbox'' techniques, are more recent.
Reducing implementation errors by at least two orders
of magnitude--Most vulnerabilities in products come from
software implementation errors. They remain in products,
waiting to be discovered, and are fixed only after they are
found while in use. Worse, the same flaws continue to be
introduced in new products. Vendors need to be proactive, and
adopt known, effective software engineering practices that
dramatically reduce the number of flaws in software products.
High-security default configurations--With the
complexity of today's products, properly configuring systems
and networks to use the strongest security built into the
products is difficult, even for people with strong technical
skills and training. Small mistakes can leave systems
vulnerable and put users at risk. Vendors can help reduce the
impact of security problems by shipping products with ``out of
the box'' configurations that have security options turned on
rather than require users to turn them on. The users can change
these ``default'' configurations if desired, but they would
have the benefit of starting from a secure base.
To encourage product vendors to produce the needed higher quality
products, we encourage the government to use its buying power to demand
higher quality software. The government should consider upgrading its
contracting processes to include ``code integrity'' clauses, clauses
that hold vendors more accountable for defects in released products.
Included here as well are upgraded acquisition processes that place
more emphasis on the security characteristics of systems being
acquired. In addition, to support these new processes, training
programs for acquisition professionals should be developed that provide
training not only in current government security regulations and
policies, but also in the fundamentals of security concepts and
architectures. This type of skill building is needed in order to ensure
that the government is acquiring systems that meet the spirit, as well
as the letter, of the regulations.
Wider adoption of security practices: With our growing dependence on
information networks and with the rapid changes in network technology
and threats, it is critical that more organizations, large and small,
adopt the use of effective information security risk assessments,
management policies, and practices. While there is often discussion and
debate over which particular body of practices might be in some way
``best,'' it is clear that descriptions of effective practices and
policy templates are widely available from both government and private
sources such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the
National Security Agency, and other agencies. What is often missing
today is management commitment: senior management's visible endorsement
of security improvement efforts and the provision of the resources
needed to implement the required improvements.
Expanded research in information assurance: It is critical to maintain
a long-term view and invest in research toward systems and operational
techniques that yield networks capable of surviving attacks while
protecting sensitive data. In doing so, it is essential to seek
fundamental technological solutions and to seek proactive, preventive
approaches, not just reactive, curative approaches.
Thus, the research agenda should seek new approaches to system
security. These approaches should include design and implementation
strategies, recovery tactics, strategies to resist attacks,
survivability trade-off analysis, and the development of security
architectures. Among the activities should be the creation of
A unified and integrated framework for all information
assurance analysis and design
Rigorous methods to assess and manage the risks
imposed by threats to information assets
Quantitative techniques to determine the cost/benefit
of risk mitigation strategies
Systematic methods and simulation tools to analyze
cascade effects of attacks, accidents, and failures across
interdependent systems
New technologies for resisting attacks and for
recognizing and recovering from attacks, accidents, and
failures
In this research program, special emphasis should be placed on the
overlap between the cyber world and the physical world, and the
analysis techniques developed should help policy and decision makers
understand the physical impact and disruption of cyber attacks alone or
of cyber attacks launched to amplify the impact of concurrent physical
attacks.
More technical specialists: Government identification and support of
cyber-security centers of excellence and the provision of scholarships
that support students working on degrees in these universities are
steps in the right direction. The current levels of support, however,
are far short of what is required to produce the technical specialists
we need to secure our systems and networks. These programs should be
expanded over the next five years to build the university
infrastructure we will need for the long-term development of trained
security professionals.
More awareness and training for Internet users: The combination of easy
access and user-friendly interfaces have drawn users of all ages and
from all walks of life to the Internet. As a result, many Internet
users have little understanding of Internet technology or the security
practices they should adopt. To encourage ``safe computing,'' there are
steps we believe the government could take:
Support the development of educational material and
programs about cyberspace for all users. There is a critical
need for education and increased awareness of the security
characteristics, threats, opportunities, and appropriate
behavior in cyberspace. Because the survivability of systems is
dependent on the security of systems at other sites, fixing
one's own systems is not sufficient to ensure those systems
will survive attacks. Home users and business users alike need
to be educated on how to operate their computers most securely,
and consumers need to be educated on how to select the products
they buy. Market pressure, in turn, will encourage vendors to
release products that are less vulnerable to compromise.
Support programs that provide early training in
security practices and appropriate use. This training should be
integrated into general education about computing. Children
should learn early about acceptable and unacceptable behavior
when they begin using computers just as they are taught about
acceptable and unacceptable behavior when they begin using
libraries.\1\ Although this recommendation is aimed at
elementary and secondary school teachers, they themselves need
to be educated by security experts and professional
organizations. Parents need be educated as well and should
reinforce lessons in security and behavior on computer
networks.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ National Research Council, Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in
the Information Age, National Academy Press, 1991, recommendation 3c,
p. 37.
5. Conclusion
Interconnections across and among cyber and physical systems are
increasing. Our dependence on these interconnected systems is also
rapidly increasing, and even short-term disruptions can have major
consequences. Cyber attacks are cheap, easy to launch, difficult to
trace, and hard to prosecute. Cyber attackers are using the
connectivity to exploit widespread vulnerabilities in systems to
conduct criminal activities, compromise information, and launch denial-
of-service attacks that seriously disrupt legitimate operations.
Reported attacks against Internet systems are almost doubling each year
and attack technology will evolve to support attacks that are even more
virulent and damaging. Our current solutions are not keeping pace with
the increased strength and speed of attacks, and our information
infrastructures are at risk. Solutions are not simple, but must be
pursued aggressively to allow us to keep our information
infrastructures operating at acceptable levels of risk. However, we can
make significant progress by making changes in software design and
development practices, increasing the number of trained system managers
and administrators, improving the knowledge level of users, and
increasing research into secure and survivable systems. Additional
government support for research, development, and education in computer
and network security would have a positive effect on the overall
security of the Internet.
CERT
Mr. Thornberry. Our final witness is Allan Paller, Director
of Research at the SANS Institute of Cooperative Research, an
organization that delivers education to people who secure and
manage important information systems. As the others, we will
include your full statement as part of the record, and you are
now recognized to summarize it. Thank you again for being here.
STATEMENT OF ALLAN PALLER, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, THE SANS
INSTITUTE
Mr. Paller. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is an honor to be
here, but I think we are even more thankful that someone of
your insight and foresight is chairing this subcommittee. I am
not sure the other witnesses here know that 6 months before
September 11th, you actually put a bill in the hopper to form a
Department of Homeland Security to bring together the Federal
initiatives, and you spoke eloquently of the technical
dimension. I am hoping that others get it earlier on this issue
of cybersecurity than we all did on physical security and that
we get the connections right; and with your partner here,
Congresswoman Lofgren, who represents easily the highest
concentration of security expertise anywhere in the world, and
computer companies, and has shown real leadership on cyber
issues--I think this could be a wonderful change in
policymaking in government, and we are looking forward to it.
With that as an introduction, we at SANS train the system
and network administrators--38,000 of them--on the front lines,
and so we feel the pain when these attacks come. So my job is
both to make some of what Bruce Schneier and Rich Pethia said
real in terms of real-world examples, but also to say where we
have succeeded and failed in trying to respond to them.
Five months ago today, we learned several big lessons with
a new worm, the fastest one ever. It was called Slammer, and it
was attacking machines--attacking addresses at the rate of 55
million every second, much faster than anything else had ever
done. So from that worm, we learned several things. One is that
we are in the middle of an arms race, that no matter how fast
we build defenses, the attackers are going to continue to build
attacks. So this isn't a war we are going to finish and get on
with our lives. This is a war we are going to be fighting a
long time.
The second lesson is that government and industry
partnerships actually work. We talk about them all the time as
if they are important, but this was a case where it absolutely
worked. I have written the details in my statement. But very
briefly, because the connections had already been established
and the trust relationships were already in place between some
of the leaders in homeland security and the private companies
that are getting attacked, there was instantaneous
communication. They got together, got the word out fast enough,
and protected a lot of people. So that was a very good example
of where the public/private partnership can pay off and where
homeland security certainly gets an 'A'. We also learned the
limits to public/private partnerships, and I laid those out in
my written testimony.
Another lesson we learned is that the physical
infrastructure really is connected to the cyber structure. I am
not sure if people believed that before. They thought, OK,
cyber attack. So my Web site went out. Who cares? It is just
kids, right? But in this attack, the Bank of America ATM
machines stopped serving up money? If you had asked Bank of
America before that event ``Are your ATM machines connected to
the Internet?'', the answer was no, and yet they stopped.
Continental Airlines couldn't schedule flights. Microsoft
couldn't even get its XPs authorized. You use that service to
register your new software. They couldn't do that because of
the attack. And Seattle's 911 system stopped answering. This is
the physical system. This is the critical infrastructure, and
it is directly connected to the cyber network, and vulnerable
to cyber attacks. So that was an education for us.
The fourth lesson that we learned, and I think the shocker,
was that computer savvy organizations like Bank of America and
Microsoft couldn't protect themselves. What Bruce and Rich were
saying about the software being bad. It was so bad that the
company that made the software that was being attacked
Microsoft couldn't protect itself. So we are in a situation
where users are getting software and hardware that is so hard
to protect, that even the people who make it can't protect
themselves. I think those lessons are useful.
The DHS provided some leadership in another area, and
Congressman Turner pointed it out in a speech he made at CSIS,
I think last week. This is a fascinating good thing that is
happening, another 'A' for DHS. A consensus of a group of
government agencies [the National Security Agency and NIST and
DHS] and private companies, companies from Intel to Mrs.
Field's Cookies are getting together to agree on what it means
to have a safe system. That is important because if you don't
agree on it, the vendors can't deliver it. If you have 50
people all arguing about what a sears system is, the vendors
are stuck. Because of that user agreement, Dell was able to
announce at the FTC hearings on June 4th--and Congressman
Turner pointed this out publicly for the first time--that they
would start delivering safely configured systems. We are hoping
that is the first ``Volvo''. Remember, Volvo started delivering
safe cars, and every other car company said, ``Sure, if the
public wants safe cars, we will start delivering safe cars.''
We are hoping that Dell's announcement is the beginning of a
movement of vendors to start delivering systems that can be
kept secure. It is going to be hard, as Rich pointed out. It is
not a ``3 weeks and we are done project,'' but it is a
beginning.
You also asked a couple of other questions. You asked about
losses from these attacks; and you asked how we measure them?
In February of 2000, MafiaBoy attacked eBay and Yahoo and also
took down CNN and Dell. I was the expert witness in the
MafiaBoy trial in Canada, so I have more data about it than I
otherwise would. I saw the data about exactly what the victims
said the attack cost them--it was confidential, but it went
into the record. Remember that they were all hit exactly the
same way. They were all down for about the same amount of time.
They were all big organizations selling things on the Internet.
So you would think that the estimates/damage would be nearly
the same. They weren't. They ranged from zero to a few thousand
dollars to one that said $5 million.
So when you try to estimate how much did this attack cost,
which one are you going to use? Are you are going to multiply
the number of companies attacked by 5 million or zero? Until we
have a protocol for defining what we mean by the costs of an
attack, we are not going to get answers that you are going to
like.
One of the things you can do to help is to ask DHS to
create such a protocol; how are we going to define the cost?
You also asked about simulations and exercises in your
letter. We haven't done much in simulations, so we don't know
how good they are. But we know exercises matter in this area of
disaster recovery. In this very institution, a fire drill found
that people turned the fire drill horns off in the computer
room. So when the fire drill went off, nobody in the computer
room did anything. You need to test emergency plans, or you
will never know what is wrong.
The more important thing that can happen in tests is that
mayors and governors, the first responders, would get to know
the cyber people, and both groups would learn each other's
needs a little bit, and they won't have to exchange cards after
the attack comes. So I think the key benefit is that kind of
sharing.
I want to close with a clarification of something that
Bruce put in his written testimony--I was sort of hoping he
would say it in his oral testimony so I could respond directly
to it--but he didn't. In his statement he described an attack
by Vitek Boden on the sewage system of Maroochy Shire in
Australia. Boden got into the computer system. He changed the
valve settings. He put back pressure on the sewage system, and
human waste rose up in the streets of the city, like it does in
your sink. People who lived there said it felt like they were
living in a toilet. But Bruce pointed out that a bird landed on
a transformer a few weeks later and did more damage than Vitek
Boden had done, so we shouldn't think about cyber attacks as
cyber terrorism. We are going to have much more likelihood of
physical damage from terrorist attack than from a cyber attack.
That is absolutely true. But the difference between Boden's
attack and the bird's accident is the bird isn't sitting around
planning how to automate the attack. The bird isn't sitting
around loading up software, analyzing it. The bird isn't
testing, deciding how much damage it can do. The bird doesn't
want to hurt us.
We have seen, as you heard from the other witnesses, that
the attacks are getting worse. They are getting worse at a rate
of, I think close, to an order of magnitude each year and a
half. The bird isn't getting that much better, but the Vitek
Bodens of the world are getting that much better, and I think
we ought to be ready.
Thank you for your time.
Mr. Thornberry. Lots of subject matter for further
discussion, which I suspect we will get to.
[The statement of Mr. Paller follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF ALAN PALLER
Chairman Thornberry, Congresswoman Lofgren, distinguished Members of
the Committee, I appreciate the opportunity to appear before you today.
It is particularly gratifying to us in the cybersecurity field, Mr.
Chairman, that a person with your foresight, vision and leadership in
homeland security has decided to take on the challenges of
cybersecurity. I am not sure whether my colleagues are aware that six
months before the September 11, 2001 attack, you introduced a bill in
the House of Representatives that called for consolidating the federal
agencies responsible for protecting our homeland. You saw the threat
clearly; you spoke eloquently of the technological dimension, but it
took a major attack before others were able to share your vision. I am
very hopeful that in the cybersecurity field progress can be made more
quickly. With your leadership and that of Congresswoman Lofgren, who
has been one of the most effective Members of Congress on high tech
issues and whose district includes one of the largest concentration of
computer companies and cyber security expertise anywhere in the world,
Congress can help the Department of Homeland Security lead a rapid
effort to reduce this nation's vulnerability to cyber attacks, turn the
tide against cyber attackers, and increase our speed and effectiveness
in responding to and recovering from the attacks that do succeed.
My name is Alan Paller and I am director of research at the SANS
Institute. SANS is an educational institution. Last year, more than
14,000 system administrators and computer security professionals, from
nearly every government agency and large commercial organization in the
US and from 42 other countries, spent a week or more in SANS immersion
training. They learned the details of attacks that will likely be
launched against them, learned how to build and manage defenses for
those attacks, and learned how to respond once an attack has occurred.
SANS 38,000 alumni are on the front lines in the fight against cyber
attacks. Once they have returned to work, we continue to support them
and more than 120,000 of their coworkers with early warnings of new
attacks, weekly summaries of new vulnerabilities and a research program
that makes available more than 1,400 timely security research briefs.
In 2001, SANS created the Internet Storm Center, a powerful tool for
detecting rising Internet threats. Storm Center uses advanced data
correlation and visualization techniques to analyze data collected from
more than 2,000 firewalls and intrusion detection systems in dozens of
countries. Experienced analysts constantly monitor the Storm Center
data feeds and search for anomalies. When a threat is detected, the
team immediately begins an extensive investigation to gauge the
threat's severity and impact. Critical alerts are disseminated to the
public via email and through the online press.
In my remarks today, I will share some of the successes and failures of
the defensive community in responding to large cyber attacks, and I'll
suggest ways that the lessons we learned might lead to effective
initiatives for the Department of Homeland Security in improving
response, recovery, and prevention.
Five months ago today, the Slammer worm attacked computers running
Microsoft's widely used database management system. A worm, for those
not steeped in the jargon of cyber security, is a malicious program
that spreads from computer to computer without requiring users to take
any action at all. Slammer represented a significant advance in attack
technology. At its peak it was scanning 55,000,000 systems per second
and that was 100 times as fast as Code Red scanned in July, 2001.
Slammer infected 90% of the systems that were vulnerable in the first
ten minutes of the attack and ultimately infected a total of 75,000
hosts. Slammer reminded the defensive community that we are engaged in
an arms race with the attackers--one the attackers are likely to
continue for many years. It did not contain a destructive payload; if
it had thousands of organizations would have lost valuable data.
Slammer's high intensity scanning continued to wreak havoc for days. It
surprised many people when it showed them that the computer systems
that make up the nation's critical infrastructure for banking and
transportation and emergency management - that some naively presumed to
be somehow separate and isolated - are actually connected to the
Internet and can be significantly affected by Internet attacks. For
example, because of Slammer, Bank of America's ATM machines stopped
dispensing money, Seattle's emergency 911 system stopped working,
Continental Airlines had to cancel some flights because its electronic
check-in system had problems, and Microsoft couldn't activate user
licenses for Windows XP. Those were just a sample of the more high
profile problems. Many other organizations were damaged by Slammer, but
they managed to stay out of the press. The cult of secrecy that
surrounds cyber attacks is part of the challenge we face in determining
costs and in helping people recover.
On a more positive note, Slammer brought our focus back to two valuable
lessons. The first, learned in the summer of 2001 as we responded to
the Code Red worm:
1. Federal and private security specialists, working together, can
create a synergy that doesn't appear to exist when they act separately.
Slammer did a lot of damage, but it did much less damage than it would
have if government and private industry had not worked together to
fight it. A team of private sector experts from large internet service
providers (ISPs) discovered the worm when it started flooding their
networks. Within minutes they contacted technical experts in government
and CERT/CC (Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center), and
those three groups joined forces to analyze the problem. They learned
that the worm targeted a specific entry point on each computer, and
that they could stop most of the damage it was doing by blocking
traffic to that entry point. The ISPs reconfigured their networks to
stop all network traffic destined for the worm's target entry point,
and their customers--at least the ones that did not have their own
infected systems--stopped feeling the pain.
For Slammer, early discovery, effective analysis and widespread
notification led to immediate extensive filtering of the worm traffic,
and that action protected many organizations from being overwhelmed.
This worked so well on Slammer that one might well ask why we do not
use the same approach on all large, automated attacks. The answer is
that two barriers get in the way and both can be eased by Department of
Homeland Security initiatives.
The first barrier is that the high speed filtering used for Slammer
does not work for many other attacks. Slammer exploited a special path
that could be blocked easily by existing network routers, without
harming valid traffic. The Code Red worm, on the other hand, exploited
the path universally used to request web pages. Anyone who blocked that
path would stop all web traffic to their site. For an organization that
uses the web for business purposes, blocking that path could inflict
more damage than the worm could cause. To filter for Code Red and other
worms that use popular paths, the network infrastructure used by large
companies and ISPs needs to be upgraded so that it can selectively
block malicious traffic. That type of high-speed, intelligent filtering
is not yet widely available from the network equipment manufacturers.
The Department of Homeland Security could help speed the availability
of high speed filtering routers through research support and targeted
procurement.
The second barrier is that the government and the rest of the defensive
community cannot respond to attacks if they do not know that attacks
are occurring. Slammer flooded huge numbers of systems, so it was easy
to find. Attacks aimed at electric power grids or e-commerce sites or
emergency response networks are not nearly as visible. Early warning
for targeted attacks is possible only if the first victims choose to
report the attacks rapidly. But just as people infected with
communicable diseases are loathe to make spectacles of themselves, so
victims of cyber attacks can see insufficient benefit in making their
pain public even to government officials who promise not to tell
others.
How can we increase prompt reporting on cyber attacks? Let's take a
closer look at the medical analogy. People who become sick, even with a
highly communicable disease, do not usually call the Center for Disease
Control. But their doctors do make the call, and the doctors maintain
the confidentiality of their patients' identities. In the cyber defense
arena, consulting companies serve as doctors to help companies analyze
cyber attacks and recover from them. This year, the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) is spending millions of dollars to create a
Cyber Warning Information Network (CWIN) that connects organizations
active in cyber defense so they can get early access to important
information. To ensure the ``doctors'' report attacks to the DHS, the
Department could require that organizations that want access to CWIN
must commit to providing immediate notification to DHS whenever they or
one of their clients is attacked, without naming the victim.
Slammer also reminded us of another significant lesson we learned in
responding to Code Red and Slapper and many other worms:
2. A severe shortage of individuals with technical security skills
combined with a lack of management focus on security issues, prevents
many organizations from fully recovering from attacks and improving
their security. Better training is a partial solution, but joint action
by government and industry to standardize security configurations and
automate patching is already having a much larger impact.
Most attacks that do a lot of damage, like Slammer and Code Red,
exploit vulnerabilities that are widely understood and for which
remedies are known. Therefore it is surprising that two years after the
Code Red worm swept through the Internet infecting vulnerable systems,
30,000 of those systems are still infected and still searching for
other systems to infect. The problem is that many organizations that
own computers have no one who understands how to secure those
computers. When we find a Code Red infected system and ask why it
hasn't been fixed, we usually hear that the system owner didn't know
that it is attacking other systems and also that there is no one with
security skills available to fix it.
Even large organizations are security-challenged. Slammer's victims
included several huge security-sensitive organizations; Bank of America
and Microsoft are examples. Their systems were flooded because
vulnerable software had not been patched and because they had not
configured their firewalls to block unwanted traffic from the Internet.
It is unreasonable to blame the software users in this case, because
Microsoft made installing this particular patch an arduous task, much
more difficult than installing the underlying software in the first
place. And most users and system administrators had never been told
they should block the offending traffic at the firewall.
Training is part of the answer. Security-savvy system administrators
are very effective at keeping their systems running smoothly while
maintaining their defenses, and several large organizations are now
requiring all system administrators to demonstrate their mastery of
security as a prerequisite for getting control of the systems. However,
most computers are not managed by system administrators. They are
managed by busy people with other responsibilities. I do not believe it
is fair or wise to expect that every graduate student or scientist or
librarian who tries to install a workstation should become a security
expert. And what about the grandparents and teenagers and all the other
people who simply want their computers to work? We cannot ask them to
develop and maintain the technical security skills needed to configure
their systems safely and keep them secure.
A better solution is to remove the pain of security by centralizing and
standardizing safe configuration and security patching. Large
organizations can do that themselves, as the Department of Energy and
others are demonstrating. But few other organizations have the time and
talent. Only the companies that sell computers and software are
positioned to make security configuration and patching inexpensive and
effective.
Happily for all of us, vendors are beginning to recognize that security
is a critical market need, and they are putting their development
dollars to work to help their clients with security. Three weeks ago at
a Federal Trade Commission workshop, Dell announced it would sell
Windows 2000 systems configured in accordance with consensus security
benchmarks, improving security and reducing the security burden for
Dell customers. Similarly, Oracle and the Department of Energy are
partnering to deliver safe configurations of Oracle software to all
users at all Department of Energy laboratories and offices. Other
Oracle users will benefit as Oracle makes the safer version available
to the general public. Both of these efforts were facilitated by an
extraordinary public-private partnership involving the National
Security Agency, the Defense Information Systems Agency, the Department
of Energy, NIST, FedCIRC, SANS, and the Center for Internet Security
(CIS). The CIS partnership has developed consensus benchmarks for safe
configuration of many common operating systems and applications. Dell,
for example, said that they would not have been able to create the new
safer version of Windows 2000 without the work of the CIS partnership.
And automated patch delivery is maturing. For example, Red Hat delivers
security updates for its software automatically as does Microsoft for
some its Windows XP software.
It is common practice today for vendors to sell software and hardware
with insecure configurations. Most users are not security experts and
therefore are not aware of the configuration dangers, nor do they have
the knowledge to find and apply appropriate security patches. All that
means that millions of computers are at risk, and each of those
vulnerable systems can be used by attackers to launch major denial of
service attacks. With active leadership by the vendors and the federal
government, worms and automated attacks will be denied easy access to
all these systems. So what can the Department of Homeland Security do
to accelerate this beneficial trend? DHS can require its vendors to
deliver safe systems out of the box and ensure that patches are
delivered automatically. As other federal agencies and companies follow
the DHS lead, the market will reward vendors that take security burdens
off their customers' shoulders.
In your letter of invitation, you also asked me to address the
challenges in estimating the damage done by cyber attacks and the
strengths and weaknesses of simulations and exercises for cyber
security. I'll answer both briefly because the general knowledge base
about both is limited.
How Much Do Cyber Attacks Cost The Victims?
In the MafiaBoy denial of service attack on eBay, Yahoo, Dell and
several other marquee web sites in February of 2000, each victim
confidentially reported its actual losses to the FBI. I know a little
about that case because I was the expert witness for the prosecution in
MafiaBoy's trial. The technical attack on each victim was basically
identical, and the outages were roughly the same length, but victims
reported radically different estimates of damage. Their estimates
ranged from zero to $5,000,000 depending on whether they included lost
revenue, damage to reputation, management time, the direct costs of
staff involved in the investigation and recovery, or none of those.
Estimating losses is much more of an art than a science.
Another example of the difficulty of estimating losses was illustrated
by the Nimda worm that raged through the Internet seven days, nearly to
the minute, after the first airliner crashed into the World Trade
Center. I interviewed more than a dozen victims confidentially, and
they consistently told me the damage they incurred was between $300 and
$700 per system--the actual cost of removing the infections from the
systems and reinstalling software and data. For 150,000 infected
systems, that adds up to about $75 million dollars. Yet within days of
the attack, an economics firm was telling the press that the price tag
was $835 million. Other people gave estimates exceeding $2 billion.
Before policy makers can rely on any damage assessments, a common
protocol for damage estimation is needed. DHS can help develop that
protocol.
How Important Are Simulations and Exercises?
Simulations and exercises are both valuable for improving America's
effectiveness in responding to cyber attacks. The mathematical models
simulating worms, created by organizations like CAIDA (Cooperative
Association for Internet Data Analysis) at the University of
California's San Diego Supercomputer Center, were instrumental in
giving policy makers effective projections of the numbers of systems
that would ultimately be infected by various worms. That kind of
knowledge is extraordinarily valuable in the pressure cooker atmosphere
of a worm infestation.
Simulating attacks through real world exercises are just as important
for two reasons. The first reason is that emergency response systems
rarely work as they were designed to operate. A few months ago a past
deputy director of the House Information Systems (now called House
Information Resource) told me a story about an exercise testing their
fire emergency response plans. He wanted to ensure his organization
would respond appropriately if a fire broke out in the building, so he
scheduled a fire drill. When the alarm went off, most people, following
patterns most of us developed in grade school, left, but no one in the
computer room reacted at all. In a real fire they would probably have
died. The problem: for some reason, in wiring the computer room, the
electricians disconnected the power to the horns that sounded alarms.
The computer room staff never heard the alarm. Without an exercise, no
one would have known.
The other reason to run exercises involves the cyber dimension of
physical attacks. Recall that in the aftermath of the September 11
attack, not only buildings were destroyed. The networks and systems of
the New York Stock Exchange and all of Wall Street were a shambles.
Without rapid reconstitution, the negative economic impact of the
September 11 attack would have been even greater than it was. Verizon
staff worked with the city's leaders 24 hours a day every day to
rebuild the telephone and cyber networks needed to get trading
restarted on Wall Street. They did an extraordinary job under difficult
conditions, and a substantial part of their success was made possible
because Verizon had already built a strong relationship with the
mayor's office and the emergency response teams through planning and
exercising disaster recovery protocols. Most cyber teams have no such
connection with first responders and they need to know one another
before an incident occurs..
We cannot have those groups exchanging business cards after an attack.
The first responders will do a better job of planning if they know the
cyber experts who can help them recover their networks and the issues
those people will face when responding to emergencies. At the same
time, the cyber people will be better team members if they understand
what the mayors and governors need and jointly develop the action
plans. We need to give the cyber people a seat at the table when
planning for emergencies. These groups should learn from each other in
advance, test communication paths and their ability to work together,
identify problems and potential solutions, learn how long things take
and how to speed them up. Exercises are the best way to make that
happen.
What Can DHS Do?
Finally, you asked about how the Department of Homeland Security should
work with the private sector in improving response and recovery. Let me
summarize two key suggestions that go beyond the recommendations I
covered earlier:
1. A central goal of the Department's cyber initiative should be to
provide a single, technically savvy coordination point that the experts
can rally around in responding to major attacks. I have been extremely
impressed by the quality of people the Department has recruited to set
up and run the new Cyber Security Tracking, Analysis, & Response Center
(CSTARC). That group proved it can do extraordinary work in bringing
together the public and private sector, both in responding to a
vulnerability in sendmail and in the Slammer worm response. The key to
CSTARC's long-term success is establishing a core group of very skilled
people who then build a network of experts inside and outside
government. Through exercises and responding to actual attacks, this
community of cyber first-responders can create protocols and allocate
responsibility for isolating malicious code, analyzing it, developing
automated diagnostic and repair tools, and disseminating the tools and
knowledge to the right people very rapidly.
2. As important as response and recovery are, prevention should have
equal priority. DHS should allocate a large share of its time,
attention, and budget to reducing the cyber vulnerabilities this nation
faces. DHS can help by encouraging and supporting development of
consensus benchmarks for safer configurations, but the Department's
greatest impact on vulnerability reduction will come from persuading
vendors of software, hardware, and network services that the government
is serious about buying and running safer systems. The federal
government is the only buyer large enough to get the attention of big
vendors. DHS should make it clear, through both talk and action, that
success in selling to the federal government is contingent upon
delivering safely configured systems and automating the process of
keeping those systems secure over time.
Thank you again for inviting me today and for your leadership in
holding these hearings. I would be happy to try to answer any questions
you might have.
Mr. Thornberry. Let me reserve my questions and turn to
Chairman Boehlert.
Mr. Boehlert. I thank all the witnesses for serving as
resources. I really appreciate it. We have got a lot to learn.
I am reminded of the story of the guy looking at his house
burning down who turned around and said to the first person he
saw, Where do I buy a fire extinguisher?
I would agree with your analysis on the Chairman. He gets
it. My concern is not enough people get it in positions of
responsibility. I think we are beginning to get it, and it is
appropriate that we have this meeting in this room, the Science
Committee room, because in January of 2001 we introduced the
Cybersecurity Research and Development Act, a very significant
undertaking calling for the authorization of a lot of money,
hundreds of millions of dollars, at a time when we are
struggling to keep the budget balanced.
But quite frankly the response, except for people who get
it--and Mr. Smith right next to me gets it--the response was a
muffled yawn; oh, we have got other things, bigger items on our
agenda. 9/11 came. Then the House passed this new multimillion
dollar--hundred million dollar authorization by a vote of,
like, 400 to 12. There were 12 that still don't get it.
So now we have this Cybersecurity Research and Development
Act. We now have an agency with responsibility for coordinating
the cybersecurity efforts of the Federal Government, the
National Science Foundation. We have NIST engaged. DHS is
engaged.
My question is, do you think enough people in this town get
it? I know the President does. He couldn't add his signature
fast enough to that legislation that we passed, but still we
had these massive authorizations, and the appropriations that
are following are minimal.
And Dr. McCrery over at DHS, I mean, part of the education
process with him, the new Under Secretary for Research and
Development, they have got to devote more resources to
cybersecurity, because you can't build a building on the tenth
floor. You have got to start with the foundation. We don't have
students in our great universities with advanced-degree
capability dealing with cybersecurity. There are a whole lot of
problems. Do you think that people in this town are beginning
to get it? Not fast enough, but beginning to get it?
Mr. Paller. I get asked frequently ``How can I get the
President of my company to pay attention to security?'' It
happens often. I had two speeches yesterday and it came up in
both of the speeches.
Executives get it, but they don't internalize it, because
it hasn't touched them where they live yet. As soon as it does,
as soon as it touches them, everything changes, just the way
everything changed after 9/11. So, no, I don't think this town
gets it, and I don't think argument is going to get them there.
I wish it would. I wish this kind of publicity would do it, but
I think it is events that educate people. I do think we need to
educate them about the events. Too few people know about that
Slammer worm and how much damage it did to the Seattle 911
system. I think we need to teach them so that they feel the
events are real. But, no, I don't think most people feel
internally that cyber threats matter to them at least not
enough to invest in effective defenses.
Mr. Boehlert. So many people think in terms of
cybersecurity and they think they want to protect themselves
against some brilliant 15-year-old hacker, but it is so much
more than that. Quite frankly, I don't think it is far-fetched.
It is not stuff of Buck Rogers to suggest that the next war
could likely be fought without bullets and guns. It could be
fought on computers.
Mr. Paller. There is no question that our nuclear systems,
that our electrical systems, that our infrastructure can be
attacked through cyber means.
Mr. Boehlert. The whole economy is dependent on it.
Mr. Paller. And our banking system. But persuading people
of that when it hasn't happened to them yet is just very
difficult.
Mr. Boehlert. You are a student. You watch what is
happening in this arena, particularly in areas of assigned
responsibility. Now, do you feel that under this new
Cybersecurity Research and Development Act, the Federal
Government is moving in the right direction with having a
coordinated source of responsibility--the National Science
Foundation for the R&D part of the effort and the education
part of the effort--because if we don't train more people who
have more knowledge about this subject and get them in
positions of responsibility, we are still going to take a ho-
hum attitude.
Mr. Paller. That bill was wonderful, and Carl Land over at
NSF is doing a great job at concentrating the funds. The money
you are spending on training students is very effective, but--
appropriations are tiny, so we haven't yet seen how much good
that money can do.
Mr. Boehlert. Well, you are preaching to the choir here,
because we are all going to push for a lot more appropriations.
Now, part of the problem has been--I remember talking a few
years ago to a high official of a major credit card company,
and he casually dropped the thought that they lose about $100
million a year to fraud and abuse, and he said, But they view
that as an acceptable loss because it would cost them more than
100 million to prevent the $100 million loss.
Well, I think that thinking is changing. But the problem
has been and the whole industry's effort has been to get a
product to the market that is faster and cheaper, and security
hasn't even been factored in. Do you see any trend changes that
customers are demanding that security be built into the product
and--for example, like I am demanding that I have air bags in
my car and seat belts, and am willing to pay a couple bucks
more for it. Do you see the market changing?
Mr. Paller. Yes.
Mr. Schneier. I don't very much, unfortunately. And the
problem is--I mean, I can hold two products; one is secure and
one isn't. They use the same marketing speak, the same words.
You, the consumer, can't tell the difference, and customers are
just as happy with promises of security than reality as
security. There is not much difference. And what I find--and
this is--I am struggling with this. I mean, there are lots of
great products. The average firewall out there is not installed
properly. You know, good software design practices are not
being followed. I mean, we have a lot of things we could do we
are not doing. Policy, no one has a good policy. They exist. We
can do this, but companies don't seem to be getting the
message.
Slammer is a great example. It did lots of damage, all
sorts of things. The average CEO never heard of it. It didn't
affect him. Your comment on Visa I think is perfect. Visa is
saying, ``Look, we have these millions of dollars of losses it
will cost us more to fix than to eat.'' That is a perfectly
rational thing for a business to do. You have a risk. You
either fix it or accept it, depending on the value. Maybe you
insure it if that is cheaper.
And so my problem is not the technologies. There are
technologies. Technologies can improve. Education is great, but
unless there is a pull, unless businesses have it in their best
interest to produce this secure software, to build secure
networks, they are just not going to do it. They are going to
say, like Visa, you know, the losses are not great enough. But
if possible, there were criminal penalties, if there were
liabilities for identity theft, if the losses were greater
because of whatever government mechanisms we like--and
depending on your politics, you pick different mechanisms. It
doesn't matter which ones you pick. If we raise the penalties,
then the cost of fixing becomes comparatively cheaper and more
companies will--Visa will say, hey, we are going to improve our
security, because now it is cheaper than letting it go, because
the penalties of letting it go are greater.
To me, the business process is broken. It is not the tech.
Mr. Thornberry. The gentleman from New Jersey, Mr. Andrews.
Mr. Andrews. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would like to thank
each of the three witnesses for outstanding and substantive
testimony that has really added a lot to this discussion.
Mr. Schneier, I wanted to talk to you about your
conclusions about what I believe you characterized as an
exaggeration of the threat of cyber terrorism, if I read your
articles correctly. I agree with you that the ability to use
the Internet as a tool of murder, a tool of death, is
fictional, largely fictional. It may happen someday, but it is
largely fictional. Our concern, though, tends to be a
coordinated attack.
I notice in your June 15th article, in the second
paragraph, you say: The software systems controlling our
Nation's infrastructure are filled with vulnerabilities. Our
concern, frankly, would be a coordinated terrorist attack
where, for example, the telecommunications system would be
compromised in a city where simultaneously four or five
explosions might occur which would disable people from calling
the police, calling the ambulance, and so forth.
And then the third is secondary-level response, would be
the economic damage that will be done to the economy of that
area. Do you agree that that is a viable threat?
Mr. Schneier. It definitely is. You think of 9/11, that is
what happened. The World Trade Center fell on top of most of
the telecommunications infrastructure of lower Manhattan. So we
see that, and, you know, I would give--if I were a terrorist
and reasonably clever, I would think of those sorts of things.
So for me, the cyber part is sort of in the noise--I mean, when
you fly a plane into a building, making people's phones not
work is kind of like the extra candles on the cake.
Mr. Andrews. Of course our concern is not that they would
fly into the building and make someone's phones not work, but
that they would find a way through the cyberspace to make the
phones not work and then couple that with a series of fairly
low-tech physical attacks that would create chaos and panic and
economic dislocation. Do you think that is a viable scenario?
Mr. Schneier. I think it is definitely worth worrying
about. And remember, attacks are getting worse. We are all
saying that. So even if I say, Look, it can't happen today,
call me back in 18 months and I will say, my God, this is a
problem.
Mr. Andrews. One of the common problems I saw from each of
you was the government's use of purchasing power to raise
standards of the cyber wall, if you will. I think Mr. Boehlert
has done an extraordinarily good job by taking care of the
research piece in the legislation that he got enacted last
year. I think we are deficient in the use of that purchasing
leverage, as well as we should. I have enormous faith in the
private sector of this country in this area. I think this is
one area where the private firms, the small ones and the large
ones, the Microsofts and the ones we don't know the names of,
have done an extraordinary job in providing technological
solutions. And I think Mr. Schneier said a few minutes ago it
is a business problem, not a technological problem, to make
those solutions even more viable.
How would each of the three of you suggest that we reorder
the Federal Government's purchasing specifications and use of
purchasing leverage so as to enhance cyber protection for the
critical infrastructure providers not in the governmental
section? To put it in plain English--and then I will stop--is
how can we increase the quality and lower the price of a
protective product that Verizon could buy or that the people
who run the power grid could buy so they could make us more
protected?
Mr. Paller, would you like to start with that?
Mr. Paller. Sure. I actually see change in procurement
happening right now. You will hear an announcement in the next
few weeks that the Department of Energy just awarded a huge
contract to Oracle, and in it they required Oracle to deliver a
safely configured version of Oracle's database software. Oracle
agree to it because DOE had a lot of money to spend, and what
made it possible was this consortium I talked about, and
Congressman Turner talked about, that has created standards,
benchmarks, so that DOE could order software with those
benchmarks.
The key fact here is that, when I mentioned the DOE
contract to the CIO at Justice, who is also the chairman of the
CIO Security Committee, his ears perked up, and he said, I have
got to get on that.
The hunger to use procurement for improved security is
there. The actions of the vendors are not quite there yet. They
honestly say ``We can't do that until you guys agree on what
you mean by 'safer,' '' and that agreement is what NSA and NIST
and DHS have been taking a lead in creating. Once you get that
kind of leadership, I think you will find that the buyers are
hungry for safer systems and will use procurement to get them.
Mr. Andrews. So you see our role as setting viable and
constantly improving technological standards that the market
will meet if we set those standards correctly?
Mr. Paller. I see your role as encouraging the industry and
government to work together to do that.
Mr. Andrews. To do that, not to buy products that don't
meet those standards for our own use. Correct?
Mr. Paller. Yes.
Mr. Andrews. Mr. Pethia.
Mr. Pethia. I think--I have two parts to the solution from
the way I see it. First of all, the idea of standards I think
is exactly on track. The problem with standards is the devil is
always in the details, and trying to have a set of standards
that actually demonstrate improved security is sometimes hard.
So I think in the short term there are obvious kinds of
product problems we know about. We have seen them year after
year after year after year. We know about configuration
weaknesses. We know about certain kind of coding errors. We
know about certain kinds of testing problems. Simply setting a
set of standards to deal with that class of problem alone I
think is one step that takes us a long way towards a solution,
and in fact we will probably get rid of about 80 percent of the
vulnerabilities that we see out there.
Once we go beyond that, however, we are going to find that
the attackers will understand how to attack even those more
secure systems, and that second step requires additional
research, because we don't know how to build--.
Mr. Andrews. My time is up. Thank you.
Mr. Schneier, if you want to--then my time is up.
Mr. Schneier. If you are a Fortune 500 company, you would
standardize in a few good products, you would write yourself a
really good purchase order and demand features that you want.
That is what you should do. The devils are in the details, but
you guys are a consumer of security. Unlike a lot of other
areas of security, your problems are industry's problems. It is
the same threats, the same attack tools, same hackers. So
everything you do immediately benefits us. It is not like you
are buying a missile, where it is all your requirements and we
don't care.
So I would like you to--I mean, with the help of whoever--
develop purchase orders, develop specifications that meet your
security needs, and demand them. I mean, you are going to buy a
whole lot of products, and companies will meet them. I agree
industry can do this if there is demand, and once you do, they
are going to offer those same products to us. They are not
stupid.
Mr. Andrews. Thank you very much.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Smith.
Mr. Smith. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me address my first question, I believe, to Mr.
Schneier and Mr. Pethia, and this is a question that really
comes from a number of meetings that I have had with
constituent high-tech companies. I represent literally hundreds
of high-tech firms and basically they tell me what I also hear
here in Washington at various briefings, and that is that a
cyber attack in some shape or form, which we know had been
occurring, are going to continue to occur and inevitably they
are going to be successful or semi-successful one way or the
other. Also, as we know, a cyber attack using cyberspace might
be in conjunction with a more conventional type of attack as
well.
But my point is this: They think we will be--that an attack
will be successful. We don't know whether yet it is going to be
planting viruses in computers, disabling energy grids in
California or Texas or wherever, but their point is that we
have the technology available now, and in many many cases these
individual high-tech companies are giving the examples of that
kind of--those kinds of solutions, but that the government is
not yet taking advantage of the high-tech solutions that are
available right now.
And I would like for you all to address really two
questions. One, to follow up on Mr. Andrews' questions, what
kind of attack do you think is most likely? And, two, do we
have the capability to defend ourselves against it? And if not
or if so, are we using all the high-tech kind of solutions that
are available to the best of our ability?
Mr. Pethia. A likely attack, I don't know how to predict,
other than the one lesson I think I learned from 9/11 is that
we have an adversary who is patient, who is willing to do
homework, who will do surveillance, who will find weaknesses,
and wherever those weaknesses are that they think they can get
the biggest benefit of, they will take advantage of. But I
don't know how to predict human behavior beyond that, but I
think it is going to happen someday.
As far as do we have the technologies we need to protect
ourselves, the answer is yes and no, unfortunately. Today if
you are a very capable system operator and you are willing to
invest a lot of time and money and you are willing to do things
like install firewalls, intrusion detection systems,
authentication devices, one-time password technology, use
encryption in the right way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
then, yes, you can do a good job of protecting your systems. So
that part of the answer is yes.
But when you put all that together and understand how
expensive it is and how complicated it is and understand that
any mistake in that whole configuration at any point can make
your systems as vulnerable as if you hadn't done anything, then
the answer, unfortunately, is no.
But we can secure our systems, but the problem is today it
is just too hard and it is just too expensive.
Mr. Smith. Mr. Schneier.
Mr. Schneier. I agree with all of that. The great military
strategist von Clausewitz would call this a position of the
interior. All right. The defender is a unit, and he has to
defend against every possible attack. The attacker just has to
find one way in, one weakness. So in that way, the defender is
at an enormous disadvantage.
All right. The attack that is likely to come is the attack
you didn't defend against, right? Because if I am the attacker,
I am not going to attack you where you are defended. So sort of
by definition, there are going to be weaknesses. Unless you
defend against absolutely everything, right, there will always
be a weak link.
I would assume the kind of attacks that are coming are the
kinds of attacks you have already seen and then the new ones
you haven't seen yet. They are going to be all over the map. We
probably have the ability to defend against some of them. These
comments were really dead on. I mean, yes, you can--all right.
If you took your computer and you turned it off and buried it
underground, no one could attack it, but it is not terribly
useful. Essentially by the very fact of we are using our
infrastructure, we make it vulnerable. Right.
Your house would be more secure if there were no door, but
you need to put a door in. Therefore, there are insecurities.
You can put a lock on your door, now there are all sorts of
problems.
Are we doing everything we can? Of course not. Because
everything we can doesn't make any sense to do. There is always
going to be a balance. Right. What is the risk, and then how do
we defend against it rationally? And depending on who makes
that balance, you are going to see different sorts of things.
Right.
The shed in my backyard doesn't have the same lock as my
front door. The risks are really different. And this is where I
sort of talk about making the risks--getting the equation
right. A lot of the risks we are facing are residual risks.
They are not risks that the companies are facing. So they are
going to look at a lot of these measures, that great laundry
list, and say that is too expensive, too complicated. We don't
have that kind of risk. They don't. But we as a Nation do, and
that is what scares me.
Mr. Smith. Thank you for your answers on a complicated
subject. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank you.
Mr. Etheridge.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And let me thank each of you for being here today. This is
not only very important but very instructive. Let me follow
that line, but in just a little different way; because on the
first hearing, the Chairman will remember, I asked a question
about a number of our software now--because we are dealing with
international companies--is done overseas. So in my State and
nearly across the country now, we have talked a little bit
about banks and others, because they are hiring a lot of
foreign firms to write software for the businesses. But
recently several banking firms have been instructed by their
security specialists to start advising financial institutions
to certify the integrity of the software that is written
overseas, as you can appreciate.
But me question is this: Do you believe software sabotage
is a real threat? And number two, how will a company check the
software to ensure the integrity of it? Who wants to tackle
that one?
Mr. Pethia. I think the problem of malicious code embedded
in software is a real problem, and I don't know that offshore
has anything to do with it. I think we have bad guys here as
well as offshore. The big problem, however, is detecting that
malicious code, and frankly, we don't have good ways to do
that.
Even in cases where the source code of the software is
available--and often it isn't--even there it is very difficult
to take a huge application, which may have literally millions
and millions and millions of lines of code, and find the 20 or
30 that cause some back door to open to let the bad guy do what
he will do. So that is another area where I think we need a lot
of research that helps us understand how to build software that
is free of these kind of defects, or if they are there, that
they can be detected. Frankly, the industry or the academic
community doesn't know how to do that now.
Mr. Schneier. Well, and luckily you get virulent agreement
among the panel here. Everything you said is right. I don't
think international makes it worse, although you can certainly
imagine a concerted effort. I don't know, I am not impressed by
that. We see a lot of sabotage for personal gain, for
extortion. I mean, I can mail you dozens of real criminal
cases. He is right. It is very hard to detect this.
In a former life, I used to do consulting where I would
look at source code, and I would tell companies, figure you
should spend as much on evaluation as you spend on development.
Now, of course, companies are never going to do that. It is
just too much. But that is the sort of thing you have to think
about. And when you look at, you know, sort of high-risk code--
now, code in Boeing aircraft, some code that the military does,
maybe for nuclear launch codes--they do that. They will spend
as much money on security and safety testing as they do on
every other aspect of the project, because it is really
important for them.
Now we are sort of entering a world where every bit of code
is slowly becoming that important; and, no, they are not ready
to deal with that. That is going to be a big deal, and it is
definitely worthy of concern.
Less from the, you know, I am going to take down the
Internet and I think more crime. Again, I think the risk of
cyber terrorism is overstated, and we grossly underestimate the
risks of cyber crime. We are seeing a lot more crime on the
Net. So when I look at these attacks, I am worried about the
ones that are criminally motivated, I am going to put something
in the code, and then I am going to call the company and say,
hey, give me a million dollars and I will tell you where it is.
That kind of thing has been done.
Mr. Etheridge. Let me follow that up, because you indicated
you touched on this earlier, that the statistics indicate that
about 80 percent of the critical cyber infrastructure is in
private hands. And I think in most of the testimony of almost
all three of you, you had suggested that how you work on that
is to encourage software vendors to create better products, and
that is really what we are about. And would you expand just a
little bit more? You touched on it earlier about what the
Federal Government can do.
Mr. Schneier. It is two things. We need to encourage
software vendors to produce better products. Then on the demand
end, we need to encourage the consumers of those products to
use them securely. I mean, there are lots of secure products
that nobody is buying. And there are lots of insecure products
that everyone is buying. And the problem--the reason we are
here is because it is not in the best financial interest of
either the software vendors or the network owners to increase
their security.
Mr. Etheridge. Let me follow it up, because I think this is
critical. If there were--let's say I go out and buy a piece of
equipment for my home. There is no coding today, whether I use
that in my home or whether I use it in business or if I am with
one of the largest banks, but if there were a code attached to
it like a 1, 2, 3 to indicate a level of security or something
on it, as you do with some other things, is that the kind of
thing you are talking about would have an impact?
Mr. Schneier. Well, I mean, completely finessing how you
would get that code, I mean, magically there and magically
accurate--I mean, that would at least provide some indication
of quality.
You know, what I want to see are the business processes
getting involved. As a security guy, I can talk with a security
person who says, yes, I am desperate for more security but when
I go to my CEO or CFO they say the risk isn't that great, it is
cheaper for us to ignore it than to fix it.
Well, that is because the risk is primarily in other
people's hands. If I am a company that owns a big database of
credit card numbers, if it is stolen, if there is identity
theft, it is not my problem. It is the problem of the people
whose identity was stolen. So I am not going to protect it to
the degree of the sum of the individual risk of my customers,
because it is not my risk.
And, I mean, there are several ways we have dealt with this
in other areas of society. You know, in environmentalism, we
passed some regulations. We have used some economic incentives.
In things like automobile security, we have liability laws. We
have also changed public perception so that air bags are
considered a good thing. All right, that was the industry
itself using security as a marketing tool. All right. That also
works. Changes in technology work. If you--if there is a door--
a good example, our alarm systems. When they became wireless,
they became a lot more prevalent, because they were cheaper and
easier to install. So as policymakers, you have several levers.
All right. You can deal with the regulation liabilities. You
can deal with putting money into technology and making that
better. You can deal with social norms.
All right. You get to choose what levers you pull, and what
the levers do is, they affect the business motivations, which
then act both the supply, producing secure software, and the
demand, wanting secure software.
Mr. Etheridge. Thank you.
Mr. Thornberry. Thank the gentleman.
The gentleman from Nevada, Mr. Gibbons.
Mr. Gibbons. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
And to our witnesses let me express my thanks as well, as
my colleagues have done, for your presence here today and the
testimony you have provided us. As I sit here, I have to admit
that I am probably one of the few people on this panel who is
not very well educated in computer technology, and it is an
evolutionary process in my own mind to get my arms around it to
understand a lot of this. And I presume that is pretty a much
widespread problem with the American public today. They know a
little bit about it but not a lot.
The evolution of technology that is occurring in the
computer industry is so rapid. Do we really have a real
expectation that what we create today will be an answer for a
15-year-old's bright inquisitive effort to break it tomorrow?
Are you comfortable with what you are saying today is the
protection and the security that we can create, will give us
the real barrier that we need to some mass disruption, some
mass attack? Anybody want to take that on? I mean, it is a
hypothetical.
Mr. Paller. My sense is that we can remove the vast
majority of the easy ways to break into our systems. Rich said
about 80 percent of the attacks--used well-known
vulnerabilities. We can wipe those out. We are not yet wiping
those out, and we have to do so right away, and that raises the
bar.
Next the research money that Chairman Boehlert was talking
about has to be invested to find better ways of testing the
code, of building more secure systems; but if we wait until we
build the better systems, then we are simply leaving all of the
doors and windows open and just saying to the attackers, ``come
get us.''
Mr. Gibbons. Well, then, Mr. Schneier, let me ask you a
question; because if that is an answer that we have got to
develop the research to provide for the capability of
presenting the real serious or in-depth attack that we just
talked about, are our universities providing a level of
expertise and resources capable of being able to do that, or
are our universities falling short in educating people?
Mr. Schneier. Some are. There is some great research being
done, some great education being done. It is not enough. The
demand for computer security far outstrips supply. If you know
any kids who are going into computers, tell them security is a
whole way to make a whole lot of money, because there is a lot
of demand for jobs, and there is great research out there,
phenomenal work.
CERT is an institution coming out of Carnegie Mellon. They
have been doing phenomenal stuff since forever. You have to
look at it as two different attacks, and what Alan was saying
is exactly right. Most criminals are opportunists. They are
getting a tool and using it. Most vulnerabilities being
exploited are the obvious dumb ones.
So security is an arms race against professionals, all
right, the people out to do real damage. Most of the attacks
are low level--it is low-hanging fruit. We can do a lot to get
rid of that and that really does raise the bar. After we have
done that, we have still got the arms race, and that is never
going away; because you are right, you know, defense now, new
attack, new defense, new attack, it is going to get worse. But
the last thing we want is for all the old attacks to work as
well as the new attacks.
Mr. Schneier. I sit at Counterpane. We monitor companies,
we monitor vulnerabilities, and the hardest thing we have is to
get rid of the kids attacking and trying to find the real
attacks.
Mr. Gibbons. Well, if we do have the capability today and
if we do have the resources that would allow for someone to
attempt or succeed in a mass disruption of our information
technology systems around the country or in any community, why
have we not seen a major effort in this regard so far from the
terrorist side? Not from our defensive side. Why have we not
seen a terrorist really try this so far? Because we all we see
today are the criminal-minded hackers.
Mr. Schneier. I have written about this. I believe the
answer is it is not terrorism. Sort of imagine Bin Laden
sitting in his cave plotting the next attack against America,
and he is not going to say, ``I know, let's disrupt their chat
rooms.'' He is not going to say that.
He is going to say, ``Let's kill a lot of people, let's
cause mayhem, let's cause terror.''
The Internet is important, but it is--it doesn't put bloody
bodies on the front page of a paper, which if you are a
terrorist is what you want to do. Eventually it might, but
today, a terrorist is not--I don't see it as a way to cause
terror.
Mr. Gibbons. If he interrupts our business systems, the
economy of this country is probably as critically important to
the lives and well-being of everybody in this Nation as
anything we can think about today.
You interrupt the food supply, you interrupt the
communications capability, people can't call a hospital, can't
get an ambulance, you interrupt their ability to go to the
store, that is as much a terrorist act as flying a plane into a
building.
Mr. Schneier. But it is harder than you think. When the
phone system went down in New York City after 9/11, people
picked up their cell phones, people used their pagers. There
are a lot of networks that got up in a few days.
Our infrastructure, even though vulnerable, is surprisingly
resilient. You see bad effects. The strike on the West Coast
closed the ports and had monstrous effects on American
industry. That wasn't terrorism, that was labor relations. And,
yes, an attack like that would cause those effects.
But, to me, and I am just trying to put myself in a
terrorist mind-set, it doesn't feel like the best bang for my
buck. Maybe it is, and maybe we have just been lucky and that
is another way to look at it. Eventually someone is going to
think exactly along your lines and do it. I mean, the question
is not if, the question is when, and maybe it will be something
we can recover in a few days, maybe it will be something we
can't recover and businesses that require the Internet will go
out of business for a month.
It is very hard to speculate. We all agree here that the
problem is getting worse. So if we are talking about 5 or 10
years, certainly I think everything you are thinking gets a lot
more reasonable and a lot more likely.
One more point I want to make based on your first comment.
I actually have a book I am going to hand out. This hearing has
homework. So I got a copy of this for all you guys, and you can
either read it or give it somebody else to read. But I did a
book sort of on computer security, and a lot of things we are
talking about here, how to understand the issues. My mother
read it, so don't be scared.
Mr. Andrews. Mr. Chairman, this is a flagrant violation of
the rules of Congress, to ask us questions and give us things
to do. This is outrageous.
Mr. Schneier. No one said you can't give homework.
Mr. Gibbons. Well, gentlemen, thank you very much for your
expertise. And thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornberry. I thank the gentleman.
My response is we need all the help we can get from
whatever source.
The gentleman from Rhode Island, Mr. Langevin.
Mr. Langevin. Mr. Chairman, most of my questions have been
answered. I am going to submit some questions for the record,
but I will yield at this time.
Mr. Thornberry. The Chair thanks the gentleman.
The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Sessions, vice chairman of
the subcommittee.
Mr. Sessions. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and I want to thank
you for not only planning, but putting together, what is a very
interesting hearing today.
I would like to switch gears a little bit, if I can, and go
to what would be the bottom bullet for each one of your
testimonies and focus, if I can, for half a second on the
attacker, who is the attacker, what is that level of
sophistication?
The second part of the question is how it is reported to
law enforcement, what are those piece parts towards trying to
catch the attacker?
Lastly, in that chain, success in working together to
identify the real threats versus what was said, to get rid of
the kids, to get the kid stuff out of the way for the real
attack.
I am interested in this chain of information. I think from
a primary aspect of business, identification, working with law
enforcement, successful prosecution, I am interested in that
summarization from any one of you.
Mr. Paller. Two things. One is the FBI has gotten
extraordinarily good at catching some of these people. The ones
they catch are the ones who do stupid things like brag,
however. So we are seeing lots and lots of successes, putting
people in jail, and they are going to jail for longer periods
of time.
When you ask who these people, Mafia Boy, for example, was
a very angry, person what teachers would call a rotten kid--who
did a lot of damage independent of his cyber work. When he got
cyber tools, he went after E-Bay and Yahoo! and took them all
down. It was part of acting out as a bad kid, but it did a lot
of damage.
What we don't know is who the people are who will do the
really complex attacks. Because we don't know who they are, we
actually have to build the defenses with more vigor than we
would if we could identify the attackers' targets and take them
out. That is why this problem is so difficult, because they
could be everywhere attacking us.
I can offer answers to the other questions, but I will let
other people speak.
Mr. Sessions. Does that mean it could be across the world,
it could start someplace and go to another, and go to 10 places
before it actually was able to be seen and we just can't figure
out the chain?
Mr. Paller. I didn't mean that. I meant it could be a group
of terrorists in Indonesia that right now is shooting guns at
people and figures out a way to get some money and uses that
money to hire some hackers who don't know that they are being
used by terrorist. We just don't know who they could be. Even
the smart hackers can be fooled into working for the bad guys.
They don't know who they are working for. Somebody claims to be
from the NSA, how does a hacker know he is not? We don't have a
clue where the attackers are. That is why we have to build the
walls so strong, instead of saying ``Let's go get those bad
guys and take them out.''
Mr. Schneier. Chapter 4 talks about who the attackers are.
Mr. Sessions. I will read my homework.
Mr. Schneier. They range from the kids to foreign
governments who are going to use cyberspace as a theater for
war, which is a perfectly reasonable thing. We do that kind of
thing in our warfare. It would be crazy to assume that somebody
won't. They are all over the map.
How is it reported? Largely it isn't. This is where you
start to think about what are the risks. There are the direct
losses, the loss of whatever has been stolen. But, for many
companies, the loss of face, the PR loss, reporting an attack
is worse than the actual damage. If you are a bank and you have
been hacked for a couple million dollars, you are likely to
want to keep it quiet. Why scare your customers?
Mr. Paller. Bruce, let me say something. I have testified
here and in the Senate about this issue, can we get companies
to report? If we get rid of the Freedom of Information Act
exclusion, can we get them to report?
The answer is, ``Hell no,'' but we were unable to prove
that until Congress got rid of the exclusion and then found out
companies still are not reporting. Now, we know that getting
rid of the FOIA problem wasn't enough. But there is a way you
can get them to report, and the analogy is medical. In medical
reporting, people who get a disease don't call up CDC and say,
``I have got a disease.'' They don't want to. It is just what
Bruce was talking about, ``It is embarrassing. I am not going
to tell anybody.'' The doctors tell; the patient doesn't
I couldn't figure out for the longest time, but I recently
discovered there are doctors in this field. They go into
companies right after they are attacked and they clean up the
mess under these contracts that are this long on
confidentiality clauses spelling out who you won't tell about
our being attacked.
You guys are funding a big project at DHS called CWIN, the
Cyber Warning Information Network, and you are giving free
access to that system, to those ``doctors.'' I think there
could be a quid pro quo for their right to get access to CWIN;
if you are a doctor and you are helping somebody, you don't
have to tell DHS who you are helping, but you must tell the
specifics of the attack, so DHS can see if it is hitting
anybody else. I think you have that lever right now, meaning
these months, and it might actually help.
Mr. Schneier. That is a great example of aligning the
business processes to meet our technological needs, because
companies don't want to report. And this will work. I mean,
that is a great example. Here you can use your buying power.
You can use your financial stick to get the data we need.
We need the data. I mean, all the data we have just plain
stinks. We don't know how often attacks happen. It is all
anecdotal.
In my testimony, I gave three pieces of data, I gave my
data and two other pieces of data. They are all mediocre,
because companies don't report.
This is very much like the beginning of the AIDS crisis. We
didn't know, or the beginning of SARS in China, things were
just not being reported.
There is a lot of success. The FBI has gotten way better.
You look 4 or 5 years ago, they were completely clueless. Now,
they are getting much better. It is attackers that make stupid
mistakes. We tend not to find either the attackers that are
good and just plain vicious.
You only attack criminals. Criminals, there has to be some
kind of financial pay off. There have been cases in England of
extortion where the criminals were caught during the money
handoff. Criminals are dumb.
When you sort of ask the levels of the attackers, you have
the smart attackers who aren't criminals, they are like Mafia
Boy, just a bad kid. You have the criminals who tend not to be
the good hackers, they are using somebody else's tools.
The real worries are going to be when you start combining
these things, right, the sort of quintessential criminal
mastermind. These people are sort of rare, because if you are a
mastermind, you tend to make more money in the private sector
than you do in the criminal sector.
But when you go to places like Russia, where you can
actually make good money in the criminal sector if you are
smart, there is a worry. Of course, on the Internet, every
place is next door to every place else. If you own a warehouse
in Des Moines, you just have to worry about criminals for whom
driving to Des Moines is a reasonable commute. If you have a
network in Des Moines, you have to worry about everybody on the
planet. That is big difference. I forget who, someone talked
about that. But that is an important difference.
Mr. Sessions. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Thornberry. Does the distinguished ranking member wish
to ask questions at this time?
Mr. Turner. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Our primary
responsibility as a committee is to have oversight over the new
Department of Homeland Security. As each of you know, the new
department inherited the functions that previously came from a
lot of other places. In the area of cyber security, we know
that the National Infrastructure Protection Center at the FBI
was transferred to the new Department, as was the Critical
Infrastructure Assurance Office of the Department of Commerce,
the Federal Computer Incident Response Center from the General
Services Administration, and the National Communications System
from the Department of Defense.
When that transfer occurred, we had several things happen.
One of which is, it appears to me, we lost some expertise,
because the top-ranking individuals who were considered to be
very capable in the cyber security area left the government.
We also noticed that the budgets of the cybersecurity
agencies transferred to the Department in fiscal year 2003
totalled $180 million. According to the OMB, the current budget
for the transferred functions within the Department will drop
to about $55 million.
In essence, the new cybersecurity responsibilities within
the Department, within the newly created Cyber Security
Division, will have in the neighborhood of 60 full-time
employees.
When you look at, as each of you I know do, from the
outside, from the perspective of the private sector, the
nonprofit community, and universities, at what this new
department is currently doing to carry out the functions that
it has been given to evaluate the threat through cyberspace and
to assess our vulnerabilities and to prepare to defend against
those threats, it would be easy to conclude that we are worse
off today than we were a year ago before the new Department was
created.
As observers of that new Department and the cybersecurity
functions which have been merged within that Department, I
would like to know how each of you would grade the current
status of the new Department in dealing with cyber security as
compared to the way things were handled by the government prior
to the creation of the Department and the transfer of
cybersecurity responsibilities to it. I will start with Mr.
Paller.
Mr. Paller. A tough question. All right. The answer in my
mind is that no organization will be able to have all the
expertise within itself, and some of the money that was lost in
forming DHS is still being spent on cybersecurity. There is an
extraordinary team at the FBI of cybersecurity analysts. There
are some phenomenal cybersecurity people at the NSA. If the new
Department gets itself organized and builds the trust of those
people in other agencies, and it is the public-facing part of a
coordinated government-wide effort, it will be wonderful. But
if you try to build the entire capability inside DHS, I think
it will just take so long that it won't do enough good soon
enough to be effective.
So I guess my attitude is that we may be spending too
little, but the way to find out is give them a lot of energy
and a lot of visibility and get them moving fast and allow them
to show what they can do with that money. Let them show us they
can do so much good with that money that we should double or
triple it, rather than saying right now we are not giving them
enough. They are just people there and only have so many hours
in the day.
Mr. Pethia. From my perspective, I think it is a positive
step to bring some of these functions together, because I think
in the past they had a tendency to each go off in their
separate direction, and there wasn't as much coordination and
synergy and impact as there could have been. Having these
groups together, I think, is a very positive thing. I am
concerned about the budget level. I think it is a big job and
there is a lot of work to do there. I know an awful lot of
desire is to have folks rely on the private sector to make a
lot of changes, but I think it is going to need a lot of
coordination and oversight.
I think the real thing to consider as we look at the
department in fixing this problem is going to be something we
are going to work at for years. This is not a sprint, it is a
marathon. Having them have the time to get the right
foundations and structures in place, build their relationships
with the rest of the Federal Government and the private sector,
I think that is the critical thing for them to do right now.
Then, as that foundation is built, understand where to
intelligently spend money for high impact is the next step. I
hope that is what we will see next.
Mr. Schneier. I actually wrote an essay really answering
your question a few months ago. With the Chairman's permission,
I will send it in afterwards.
Nix, is my answer. My intuition is that security can't be
the purview of one organization. It has to be diffuse. If you
sort of think about your body fighting disease, there is no one
organ in charge of disease fighting. There are lots of
different things done by lots of different organs in your body.
A lot of them overlap. This are redundancies. All of these
things help our body's security against disease.
I actually like it when multiple organizations are working
on the same thing, because they are going to work on it
differently. I like it when security is the responsibility of
everybody, because everybody will do something. I don't like it
when Department X can say well, security, that is Homeland's
purview. We don't care.
On the other hand, coordination is essential. You need to
be able to work together, because a lot of these problems are
bigger than any organization.
So I like it when the Department of Homeland Security
coordinates. I like it less when they subsume. The real answer
is a little more complicated than that, and I will send it in
for the record, but that is my intuition.
There is good and bad here. The loss of funding is a
perfect example of bad. There are actually few corporate
mergers that work out well also. These sorts of things are
common when corporations merge. We are seeing the same sorts of
things with DHS. Eventually, it could be a good thing, it could
be a bad thing. Right now, it is very mixed.
Mr. Turner. Thank you.
Mr. Thornberry. The gentlewoman from Texas, Ms. Jackson
Lee.
Ms. Jackson-Lee. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would
like to ask unanimous consent that my opening statement be
submitted into the record.
I thank the panelists very much for their insight. I will
be brief with respect to the issues of this committee because I
have listened closely for the time that I was here. I apologize
for my delay. I had responsibilities elsewhere in the Congress.
I simply want to acknowledge that we have had the
opportunity to be in field hearings across the country and have
heard from those individuals who have to fight these issues
directly with respect to port security and other issues and law
enforcement who are on the ground, if you will. And the key
statement that they make is how much is on the Internet, the
Web, the voluminous information.
I recall right after the 1995, I believe, bombing in
Oklahoma City, that all of a sudden it seemed to be in vogue on
how to make bombs with fertilizer. As a Member of the House
Judiciary Committee, it is likewise equally amazing at the
number of recipes for creative drug use that can be found.
Then, of course, we go smack against this whole question of
the first amendment and the protection of a nonencrypted Web
system.
So if I could ask Mr. Schneier to confront this head on, in
terms of the backdrop of the constitutional protections, the
industries' concern, and the freedom of commerce, I guess, that
everything goes. But that means that terrorist cells can
communicate, while students are communicating, so terrorist
cells are communicating, but it also means signals can be sent
and it also means directions in code can be sent.
How do we confront that issue head on? You may have been
answering it over and over again, and here we go again.
Mr. Schneier. Actually, what I tend to do because I do get
these questions a lot, is I tend to write the answers down, so
I don't have to do them much. And I have written about this. It
is a very hard question, balancing secrecy and security,
because there is a notion that secrecy is somehow equal to
security.
You talk about bombmaking tools and drug recipes, I assure
you, those things were available before the Internet, and you
really can't bottle them up. And you are right in that, you
know, all tools of our technology can be used for good and for
ill. I mean, we drive to work and criminals use cars as get
away vehicles. You know, demolitions have good and bad uses.
Cell phones have good and bad uses. Even network security
products have good and bad uses, and we are stuck with that.
That is the way the world works.
Everything we have ever built has uses for good and bad,
and we as a society have to decide. We can live in a
totalitarian regime and decide no one should have access to a
photocopier or mimeograph, which was true in some countries in
Eastern Europe. Or we can say the good uses outweigh the bad
uses.
I went to the Washington Monument yesterday because I got
in a little early. I wanted to go up and see it since it was
redone. I was looking at the security. You know something? We
would have a better job securing it, if we didn't let people
inside. It would be more secure. But we believe that letting
people tour our national monuments is a worthy thing to do, and
we are accepting the security risk.
Ms. Jackson-Lee. Let me just say this. You are making what
can be a creative analogy, but we have put in place since 9/11
more structures, more security, more metal detectors, more
procedures in going on airplanes, et cetera.
What I would say to you is we are going to have to contend
with this question of cyber security. We are going to have to
be more responsible. I am a person that believes totally in the
1st amendment and all of its yeas and nays, all of the
positives and negatives. But I do believe cyber security is an
enormous challenge.
For example, as one of our witnesses in one of our hearings
indicated, the economic collapse that could come about through
the tinkering why our financial system could be dastardly in
its results. Certainly loss of life, the emotion of loss of
life, the absolute repugnant concept that we would lose lives
in a terrorist act, certainly supersedes the thought as it
relates to an economic collapse, but that still would shut us
down.
I guess what I am putting on the record is we have enormous
challenges. If you have some suggestion or direction, I would
be interested in it. I would be delighted if you would put that
in writing for us to be able to handle that. If you have one
sentence on that response, then I yield back my time.
Mr. Schneier. The problem with secrecy is it is brittle.
When you lose secrecy, you lose all securities. I prefer
security measures that are resilient. If my front door is
protected by a secret code, if someone knows the code, I have
no security. If my front is protected by a guard and alarm,
then there is more resilience. There is no secrecy that I am
relying on for my security.
That is the intuition in the relationship between secrecy
and security. Sometimes it is valuable. Most of the time, I
believe it is a red herring. Openness is better. We need
security in addition.
Ms. Jackson-Lee. I see the red light. I just want to say
this: With all of my passion and commitment for the 1st
amendment, I believe that this committee and the Department of
Homeland Security has a moral and dictated obligation to deal
with the question of cyber security, and we have got to
confront it. I hope we will have the experts to help us do so.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Thornberry. I thank the gentlewoman.
It seems to me that all of you are pretty much in agreement
that attacks are getting worse and attacks are getting easier
and that we could do a lot to deal with 80 percent of these
attacks, say, relatively easily, and then we are better able to
concentrate on the more sophisticated ones.
I want to be clear. What is it that is required to solve
the 80 percent? We have talked some about incentives,
liability, maybe taxes. Some people have talked about SEC
disclosures and other kinds ever incentives for private
companies. Or is it incentives for the software, ISP's and so
forth that have been talked about?
Just so I can be clear, first, how do we take care of the
80 percent?
Mr. Pethia. Let me start. For me, the first big piece is to
take care of the, let me call them low-level defects in our
information technologies. It can be done by vendors doing a
better job of design and testing. The software engineering
community knows how to do a better job of that. We know how not
to get these kinds of bugs embedded in our software. People can
be trained to do development, where they don't produce as many
mistakes. We can do it with more concentrated testing. We can
do it with testing labs that are established to find these
problems before they are deployed out into the broad community,
or even after things are deployed, to find them. And vendors do
respond to reported problems. They do fix them when you bring
them to their attention.
So, first of all, I think we have to pay attention to the
installed base of software, and there is a variety of different
approaches to do that.
The second thing is I think we need to do a better job, all
of us, of working together. We have been talking about
information sharing for a large number of years, but as Bruce
said, it is often catch-as-catch-can; it is haphazard; it is
anecdotal information.
We needed to build a national system of data collection,
analysis, indications and warnings, so we can begin to
understand of all these things we see, which ones are serious
and which ones are noise in the system. I think that is a
combination of a research effort, but it also requires that
organizations that run major networks do a better job of
monitoring them.
I think we start to touch on privacy issues when we get
into that world. So we need to look at that balance between
privacy and the need to understand what is happening to us. So
there a set of policies and research questions there.
But I think those two things alone can get us to the 80
percent solution. And I don't think it is tens of years, I
think it is years, not tens of years, to do that.
Mr. Thornberry. Anyone else wish to address that?
Mr. Paller. Mr. Chairman, we can fix two sets of problems.
One is the vulnerabilities in machines that will be installed
starting tomorrow, and the other is the vulnerabilities in the
150 million machines that are already there.
What Rich is talking about is looking at the machines that
are going to be installed sometime after tomorrow. So we really
have to go after both of those sets of problems.
For the new machines, we either use regulation, as Bruce
would like us to do, or liability, or we make the market solve
the problem, and that is what I think Homeland Security can do.
Homeland Security can lead the Federal Government in
creating the procurement specifications that say, ``You can't
sell us a system that has these certain vulnerabilities in it.
We know what they are. You just have to sign this statement
saying you have taken them out or you can't deliver the
system.'' That would change the economics of the problem, and
they will start delivering safer systems. That helps with the
forward-looking machines, the ones that get installed after you
write that specification.
To go backwards to the installed base, I think we could
take a lesson from the Department of Transportation. DOT has
done an extraordinary job of wiping out vulnerabilities across
the Department. I think DHS can learn from the agencies that
have been successful. Homeland Security can be the model, and I
think that model will spread. But we need to do both and go
after new machines using procurement, and go after the old
machines using vulnerability remediation.
I need to add one more piece. People are building hardware
with vulnerabilities, and you are buying them right now, and
when you move to wireless, you are goint to see vulnerabilities
in billions of devices. Every one of those devices can be used
as an attack tool. So this isn't something we need to spend the
next year and a half thinking about. We need to act now.
I will give you an example. Every one of your storage
devices, where you put your most important information, has
something called IP management ports. The ports were put in for
the convenience of the guy who sold the storage system to you
so he can help you fix it if it breaks.
Some of those IP ports come with known vulnerabilities,
SANS and the FBI publish every year the top 20 Internet
vulnerabilities. Storage devices come with many of these top 20
built into the hardware.
Your procurement people are continuing to buy that stuff,
because the people who buy it don't know it has common
vulnerabilities. That needs visibility. Homeland Security
should be taking the lead on procurement programs, and then
helping, maybe through a partnership with the Government Reform
Committee, helping other agencies do the same thing.
Mr. Thornberry. Let me just throw in another wrinkle for
you, Mr. Schneier.
Mr. Schneier. I will take wrinkles.
Mr. Thornberry. I was in a meeting last week where a CEO of
an information technology company said as bad as we think the
security problems are for us with 300 million users on the
Internet, whatever it is, think about how much worse it is
going to be if that triples. And if you think about wireless,
plus the number of additional devices that are going to be
using the Internet, plus some natural growth in number of
people around the world, that it nearly makes the problem
insoluble.
Sometimes I worry, as you all have described, we are
getting further and further behind. Maybe we could do all of
these things and solve this 80 percent, but there are going to
be another 80 percent that takes its place in a way. How do we
catch up and stay up?
Mr. Schneier. It sounds like you got it.
Mr. Thornberry. But I don't like what I have got.
Mr. Schneier. Well, you know, sorry. A lot of it, the
analogy I use is, you know, is curing malaria by draining the
swamp. You have got all of this swampland out there. It is
horribly insecure, and we are trying to improve security by
fixing it. The problem, as you point out, is we are creating
swampland at such an alarming rate, that we are falling behind.
Yes, you are right. You are 100 percent right. The thing
about these easy fixes, I mean the things we are talking about
here, is they are actually easy. It is not things we discovered
2 years ago that need to be fixed. It is things we discovered
20, 30, 40 years ago and no one has fixed.
The most common attack is something called a buffer
overflow. It doesn't matter what it is. These were first
identified in the sixties. They were first used to attack
computers in the seventies. There was a very famous attack in
1989, which was a buffer overflow.
So here we are in 2003, and, still, the most common
Internet attack is a buffer overflow. This is an easy one. We
know how to fix this. This is trivial to fix. These guys will
teach classes in how to write code buffer overflows. This isn't
even a hard problem.
So yes, we are creating new swampland, but the problems we
are talking about here are so basic, they have been with us
since the beginning of computing, and there has never been the
business incentive to make them better. So once you do that,
there will be a change.
You are right, there will always be new vulnerabilities. We
raise the bar, the bad guys will get smarter, guaranteed. But
at least the ones who are not smarter, are out of business. We
are better off than we were.
So we are not here with a message of hope. We are here with
a message of we can actually do better than we are doing.
Mr. Thornberry. Good point. Practicality. The alternative
is to do nothing, which is to accept the vulnerabilities, and
that is not a good answer either.
Take the 80 percent. Let's talk for a second about the
other 20 percent. Do any of you have suggestions as to the way
Federal research dollars and efforts ought to be directed to
help deal with that 20 percent?
Mr. Schneier. I can do that. Actually, you go. We'll flip
for it.
Mr. Pethia. Let me start. We have been talking a lot about
sort of sticks we can use to encourage the right kind of
behavior, but I think there are incentives as well.
The Internet today is a result of the original DARPA
projects, the ARPA net, which was focused on building a
resilient network that could withstand physical attack. And it
has done that job amazingly well. It has grown into this new
infrastructure, it has created a whole new industry.
I think we can do the same with security, if we think about
not Internet II, but maybe Internet III or Internet IV, where
the focus is not on resiliency from physical attack, or it is
not on what, as Internet II is, on higher speeds, let's have
the next grand project be focused on the ultimate high
security.
I think that mobilizes the research community, the
industrial base, and they all begun to work on this new common
set of solutions, which is technologies that are significantly
more secure than the things we have today, from the beginning,
security that is designed in, as opposed to what we do today,
which is try to bolt it on to the outside edges of
fundamentally insecure projects.
Mr. Schneier. I like to see research money spent willy-
nilly. I think the most best research, the most interesting
things, come out of the most surprising places. Because I write
books and give lectures, I get a whole lot of people's term
papers, and there is really cool stuff being done out there.
Some of it is so interesting it never would have occurred to
me.
If we are going to fund research, now we are talking about
many years ahead, we need to be broad. We need to recognize
that this is a critical area of our society and that we need to
fund research programs at a variety of institutions, maybe even
internationally. There is great things being done in Europe and
Asia. This problem is even bigger than our country. It is all
the same Internet.
I love the idea of procurement and research on a secure
survival Internet. That is how we got the Internet. That is how
we will get a secure Net that is great.
And then keep in mind that we should just fund research
institutions, universities, that are doing cutting edge work in
computer security. Whether it is producing secure hardware and
software, like the computers we are going to install tomorrow,
or backfilling and securing the computers we installed
yesterday.
Research is good. Great stuff comes out of research. I love
it when I see it, because it is creative, it is interesting,
and it is looking at things that are off the horizon.
So I encourage lots of research, because you never know
what is going to bear fruit.
Mr. Thornberry. Mr. Paller, I would like to ask you to
answer however you like and throw in another wrinkle, and, I
don't know how to say this, but do we need research on some of
the cultural aspects of security, whether people on a keyboard
are really going to do it, use it? How does that play in to
making the whole Internet secure? The people vulnerability, I
guess, is the way I would put it?
Mr. Paller. It is really no fun to try to finish the job of
figuring out how to do the technical security work when you
know that having finished that, you still have an enormous
vulnerability from people taking their laptop home, giving it
to their 11-year-old, who downloads a really, really cool
screensaver that has a trojan in it that the hackers use to get
right back into the House systems, because you have a VPN that
runs from your laptop at home into the system in the House. We
know that is a problem. I would love to see research in solving
it.
My sense is that it is a safe driving type of problem,
meaning it requires a long-term cultural change. This
afternoon, for example, Bob Liskowsky and I are giving out
awards to 10 kids from kindergarten to high school all over the
USA who created posters on improving computer security.
It is a tiny drop in a huge ocean, but a long time from now
we hope kids will talk about safe computing at home the way
they get mad at their parents for not wearing their seatbelts.
It took a long time for kids to tell their parents to put their
seat belts on. I think research will help. I think visibility
like this subcommittee provides will help. It is a long-term
program.
Mr. Thornberry. I guess the question is how much pain we
have to go through or how many people have to go through the
windshield before we do it.
Mr. Schneier. A lot.
Mr. Thornberry. Does the gentleman from Texas have other
questions?
Mr. Sessions. Yes, I do, Mr. Chairman. Thank you so much.
One of you gentleman has already accused our Chairman of
``getting it,'' probably you, Bruce.
Mr. Schneier. I probably did.
Mr. Sessions. My question is, I have heard you allude to
the FBI as being perhaps short of being a center of excellence,
but you did accuse them of stepping up, understanding. Let me
tee it up. Fighting city hall is hard. They are the experts.
They know everything. They are the ones that set the standard
and tell you stop or go or maybe so. You never really get a lot
of answers out of them.
Does our government, outside of this great subcommittee,
the government, the agencies, do they get it? Do they listen to
people? Do they respond? Or are they just at limitations with
money or other things? Do they get it?
I am talking about the computer security experts in these
agencies sharing information, talking with you, being leading
edge, knowing what is wrong, aiming at the problem, talking
about things, leading to where our children understand it, all
those things.
Mr. Schneier. The computer security experts get it. We have
any number of customers in local and Federal Governments.
Uniformly, computer security experts either in governments or
industries get it. The problem they have is going one level
above them, convincing their boss, convincing the CEO,
convincing whatever the legislature is that is appropriating
funds.
The security people always get it. I mean, they know the
problems, they understand it. It is one level above that we
have the problems at.
This is where you find that people tend not to get it.
Either they downplay the risks, or they overreact. We have
seen, I forget the State, but some kid hacked into a school
computer and changed grades, and he is being tried as an adult.
To me that is huge overreaction. I mean, changing grades is an
enormously big thing and should be dealt with as you would deal
with that, maybe expulsion, but he is still just a kid, he is a
dumb kid. You don't want to destroy their life by making them a
felon.
So you need to temper. Even our prosecution, it has to be
sane. I see a lot of what I think is insane prosecutions
because we are overreacting.
I am reminded of the Wild West, when stealing a horse was
punishable by hanging, because that was such an enormous part
of the Wild West transportation infrastructure that the
punishment exceeded the crime. We are seeing that again here.
So, you know, I see ``don't get it'' at different levels. I
see it at the level above the computer security people, the
Governors, the Mayors, who tend to downplay the risks, just
like corporate bosses do. And then I also see the prosecutors
either, Federal or State, basically going to lynch kids.
I think both are bad. How is that for inflammatory?
Mr. Pethia. I would like to build on that. One of the
things I think is very positive in the government right now is
the whole list of regulations moving now to FISMA, and I think
it has done a lot to have senior executives in the agencies
begin to understand that there is a problem there.
What I see though is we are starting to get stuck at the
point where people are worried about compliance with
regulations or compliance with standards, which says they are
not quite far enough up that learning curve as we have to do.
The thing to remember about computer security is it is a
daily event. It is not just complying with a standard or a
regulation, it is day-to-day having the awareness, to keep your
eyes open, to watch for that strange thing that is some
indicator that your systems are being compromised.
So there I think we have to help the senior officials push
up that next step, beyond compliance regulation, with a real
understanding of there are critical assets that have to be
protected, they can be attacked in a number of different ways,
and everybody has to be trained, aware and vigilant.
Mr. Paller. Let's bring these all back together. Yes, we
have to persuade them in. But right now, when they get an
expert in that expert comes with a price tag that is enormous,
and when they ask, ``Is that enough?'', the expert will say
``No!'' So you have a meeting with a guy who says, ``Spend $50
million, but it won't keep your system safe.'' And you say come
back to me when you get a clue.
There are good models in governments. Congressman Smith was
getting at it when he said we have to make security cheaper.
People in government are figuring out how to lower the cost of
security, and that is where we are going with using procurement
to push vendors. The vendor push is not to put the costs on the
vendor, the user still has to pay for it. The vendor push is to
get the economies of scale that you get when the vendor does
initial security instead of making every user do it.
DOE's procurement is not trying to force Oracle out of
business. It is saying, ``Look, Oracle, if you deliver safe
systems, every one of the Energy labs can get those safe
systems, instead of making every Energy user become a security
expert before he ever installs the software.''
I think that the other discussions we were having about
pushing it back on the vendor to getting safer systems, allows
senior management to say, ``OK, I can see that working, let's
do that, let's get those vulnerabilities eliminated.'' And, in
fact, FISMA requires the agencies actually test their systems.
That is what I meant by going back over the old systems and
making sure the security controls are in place. I think there
is reason for hope. I don't think we will win the war, but I
think there is reason for hope.
Mr. Sessions. I have one last question. I have not
participated in it, but evidently Microsoft, the way I
understand it, they have an open chat page about all their
products, the design problems, and all these millions of users
e-mail in.
Mr. Schneier. It sounds plausible.
Mr. Sessions. Somebody evidently designs a system where
they take user input and they fix things, and they have the
user community try to provide input about fixing software
programs.
My question is, in all these chat rooms and all this
feedback that comes from people, do they understand that if you
are going to use this equipment that there is an ethics about
it, or do they just think, hey, what I would say a
skateboarder, whoever can do the next wild thing, go for it,
and everybody sits there and applauds? Or is there an ethos
within at all that is ever applied to these people?
Mr. Paller. I have never seen an ethos. There was a survey
done in Australia of how many kids in the 12th and 13th grades
were breaking into other people's computers 4 years ago, and it
was 3.2 percent of all the males. I don't think there is any
ethos being taught.
Mr. Schneier. But we should take heart in that. Most people
are ethical. Most people are honest. The great majority of
people on our planet are honest. That is why society works. We
would just fall apart if that were not true. We are dealing
with the few. I mean, three percent is still three percent.
Cutting that down by a tenth would be really good.
This is how we eventually win, I believe. Sort of imagine
we are having this hearing about murder and how do we deal with
murder? It is happening. I mean, there are no technological
fixes. What do we do?
All right, we don't prevent murder in our society by
wearing body armor. We don't drive tanks, we don't live in
fortresses. The reason murder is so low is that we have carrots
and sticks. We teach ethics. We expect our children to behave
ethically. We reward them if they do, and there is a criminal
system to punish them if they don't. That is really how we deal
with crime.
No one says we think everyone should wear a bulletproof
vest walking around the street, no matter how bad the murder
rate is. I mean, it is not something we do.
Now, this is very long-term, but in the end I think that is
going to be the way out. But you still have to deal with the
few, and, of course, the problem on the Net is the magnitude,
right? The few can do a whole lot of damage.
Mafia Boy, who we have brought up again and again, can
attack dozens of web sites. The guy who wrote the Sequel
Slammer Worm can have it spread across the Internet, some huge
number of servers, in 15 minutes, in 20 minutes.
So we can, through education, through deterrence, make sure
most everyone is ethical. The few that are aren't can do so
much damage, either out of maliciousness or even by accident,
or out of carelessness, or out of, you know, dumb-kidness, that
we need to have these high walls.
There is in the military, I forget who it is, who looks at
society, the danger in terms of how many people 10 armed men
could kill before being subdued. He will go through history and
calculate this. All right, that number is going up
exponentially with technology.
The Internet has all the kinds of characteristics of that
exponential growth. One guy can do a whole lot of damage. So
even if we have everybody ethical on the planet except 10, we
are at risk. That is a hard position to be in. It is no fun to
be here. This is the ugly side of technology.
Mr. Thornberry. But that is where we are, as you said
earlier, in all sorts of areas.
I guess I have got one last question, because I don't think
it has been touched on, and I am interested, Mr. Pethia,
particularly in your perspective, on the kinds of information
that government should provide to the private sector about
threats that are out there, warnings perhaps, obviously this is
part of what this new part of the Department is going to focus
on.
But can you address that a little bit, as well as
addressing how you have to weigh, how much information about
threats you put out there, versus the government's duty, if it
has that, to say watch out, this is coming, when, as you have
all already described, when something starts going it goes
quickly, and it is going quicker and quicker.
Mr. Pethia. I guess a couple of points. One of them is
certainly, I think, the government, and it has been doing it
through my organization and through NIPC and through a number
of others, when there are recognized new forms of attack, to
make sure that that is broadly and as quickly as possible sent
out to the community so they know how to protect themselves.
And a lot of that is with the hope people can react fast
enough. As you say, these things are happening faster.
One of my big concerns, which is yet another issue, is that
we are reaching the limits of our reactive capability, I think
nationally. We are all going to get incrementally better, but
we have already got the 80 percent. We are already going about
as fast as we can.
So we have got to focus more on prevention. We have to look
for earlier signs of attack. We have got to look for earlier
indicators that something bad is coming at us. And there, I
think, DHS ought to look at doing things like looking at the
evolution of attack technology, and beginning to predict where
it could go in the future, what we are likely to see in 6
months, 8 months, 12 months, what have you, and trying to get
that information out to the community.
Real threats, I mean real people doing bad things, getting
as much information as they can out to the likely targets of
those classes of people, which industries are being attacked
and how, so those industries now how to protect themselves.
Mr. Thornberry. Does anybody else wish to address that?
That is helpful.
Mr. Andrews. Mr. Chairman, if you could yield for a moment,
I wanted to express my appreciation to you and the staff, the
majority and minority staff and the witnesses, for what I think
has been a profoundly important hearing. I very much appreciate
what the witnesses have had to say.
What I wanted to suggest to you, Mr. Chairman, is that we
consider working with the Government Reform Committee, which
has primary jurisdiction over government purchasing, so the
kind of purchase-based leverage that we have heard about from
each of the three witnesses today, goes beyond what the
Department of Homeland Security do, but reaches into every
aspect.
Frankly, the Department of Agriculture should be buying
software that is as good as it can get for reasons of
bioterrorism. The Department of Transportation should be buying
software as good as it can get when it deals with issues of
oceanography. The Department of Education should be buying
software as good as it can get to protect the security of
student records.
This not only has benefit in carrying out the missions of
those various departments, but it multiplies the leverage that
these witnesses have talked about here today, and I think would
expedite the process of raising the level of technology.
One thing that Mr. Schneier said that I thought was an
interesting analogy was the wireless burglar alarm systems in
our homes. I would not have been able to afford a burglar alarm
system 15 years ago, they were too expensive. Now, they are
relatively inexpensive.
That is the metaphor. I think that is the analogy we could
achieve for the civilian sector, so when the CIO of a company
hears from his or her outside consultant that you need to spend
quite a bit of money to ramp up, it isn't nearly as much money
as it is today. It fits those economies of scale.
I think it has been very powerful testimony. I thank you
and the staff for an excellent hearing.
Mr. Thornberry. I thank the gentleman. I think you make a
very good point. I would simply add, I also don't dismiss the
Department itself's information technology. I think one of the
things that I know is of interest to most members on this
subcommittee is how the Department gets its own IT up and
running and the security there. We have further work to do
there, as well as working with the other departments.
Let me again thank each of our witnesses. I agree it has
been very helpful for me. Let me say there may be written
questions that may be directed to you. We will try not to over
burden you. At the same time, I want to offer each of you the
opportunity to submit further comments if you think it would be
helpful to us, because most of us do read that stuff, and we
are interested in learning and trying to find solutions to
these problems. I very much, again, appreciate your time and
flexibility in being here today.
Let me, finally, announce that I think this room is going
to be used for another hearing of the full Homeland Security
immediately after this, and they asked me to ask if we could
clear the room so they can get ready for that hearing which
begins at 2:00. In the meantime, we have votes on the floor.
This hearing is adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 1:25 p.m., the subcommittee was adjourned.]