Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File

AT: Cyber Terrorism

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia: The world's countries must cooperate more to fight the threat of cyberterrorism attacks, which could threaten facilities such as nuclear power plants, officials said Tuesday at an international conference. Government authorities and technology experts from more than 30 nations made the call at the opening of the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Information technology has "changed the dynamics of terrorism," said Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the International Telecommunication Union, the U.N.'s leading information technology agency. "The harsh reality is that (information technology) has become a tool for cybercrime and cyberterrorism," Toure said in a speech. "Cybersecurity must become a cornerstone of every aspect of keeping ourselves, our countries and our world safe." Delegates came from countries including Australia, Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand and the United States. Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said cyberattacks could trigger "truly catastrophic consequences" by disrupting systems that control telecommunications networks, emergency services, nuclear power plants or major dams. "Cyberthreats are not something that modern societies and their governments can ignore," the prime minister said. "It is necessary for governments and countries throughout the world to work in concert." Malaysia will be home to a new center to be run by the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Terrorism, a project involving both the public and private sectors. The center is expected to open by the end of year and will serve as emergency response, training and resource center to counter cyberthreats. "The bottom line is the threat is real," said Howard Schmidt, a former U.S. adviser to the White House on cybersecurity. "It'll be from criminals, it'll be from state-sponsored activity, it'll be from organized crime, so the idea of this is to reduce the vulnerability" of countries.

A new report by a Washington policy think tank dismisses out of hand the idea that terrorist groups are currently launching cyber attacks and says that the recent attacks against U.S. and South Korean networks were not damaging enough to be considered serious incidents. The report, written by James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, looks at cyber-war through the prism of the Korean attacks, which many commentators have speculated originated in North Korea. However, there has been little in the way of proof offered for this assessment, and Lewis doesn't go down that road. Instead, he focuses on whether the attacks constituted an act of war and whether they could have been the work of a terrorist group. "The July event was not a serious attack. It was more like a noisy demonstration. The attackers used basic technologies and did no real damage. To date, we have not seen a serious cyber attack. That is only because the political circumstances that would justify such attacks by other militaries have not yet occurred and because most non-state actors have not yet acquired the necessary capabilities. As an aside, this last point undermines the notion of cyber terrorism. The alternative to the conclusion that terrorist groups currently lack the capabilities to launch a cyber attack is that they have these capabilities but have chosen not to use them. This alternative is nonsensical," Lewis writes.

Steven P. Bucci– P.h.d IBM's Issue Lead for Cyber Security Programs, 6/12/09 “The Confluence of Cyber Crime and Terrorism” http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/hl1123.cfm