Return of The Dirty Hippie Terrorists

Loyal 27B readers will remember that the government is already prepared to deal with patchouli-drenched hippies from Freedom Not Bombs telneting havoc on the nation's computers and power grid -- just see the results of the 2006 Cyber Storm exercise. But this is post-9/11 world where you can never be safe enough, so another Cyber Storm test is planned for 2008.

The test will be a follow-up to the February 2006 Cyber Storm test, which was billed as the largest-ever U.S. government online attack simulation.

Cyber Storm 2 will be conducted in March 2008, said Gregory Garcia, assistant secretary for cybersecurity and telecommunications with DHS, speaking at the RSA Conference in San Francisco last week. Like the first Cyber Storm, this exercise will evaluate the ability of the public and private sector to provide a coordinated response to a large-scale cyber event, he said.[...]

Security experts say that Cyber Storm has improved participants’ understanding of whom to call in the event of an attack, but hasn’t necessarily identified specific vulnerabilities in the nation’s computer systems. "What they’re trying to do is highlighting the inefficiencies in the process," said Marcus Sachs, deputy director with research group SRI International’s Computer Science Laboratory. "They’re not really looking for technical solutions."

Link.

Photo: Marshall Astor