DHS Report: IT Sector is Resilient Against Serious Cyberattacks
A U.S. Department of Homeland Security presents scenarios in which well-chosen attacks against key IT infrastructure elements could cause disruptions on a national scale. The document also offers a surprisingly sunny assessment of the resilience and redundancies within the IT sector to mitigate the risk of such disruptions.
Wed, August 26, 2009
Computerworld — A report from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security presents several scenarios in which well chosen attacks against key IT infrastructure elements could cause disruptions on a national scale. But the document also offers a surprisingly sunny assessment of the resilience and redundancies within the IT sector to mitigate the risk of such disruptions.
The 114-page report , released Tuesday, titled the "IT Sector Baseline Risk Assessment," was a joint effort between the DHS and the Information Technology Sector Coordinating Council (IT SCC). It is designed to give planners in the IT sector and in government a way to identify high-consequence risks and strategies for addressing them.
The report examines risks to six critical areas in the IT sector - IT supply chain, domain-name resolution services, identity management and trust support services, Internet-based content and communications services, Internet service and routing providers and providers of incident response services.
Experts in their fields evaluated high-consequence risks in their areas. They also looked at related vulnerabilities and the potential consequences of incidents that are either enabled or deliberately caused by someone with malicious intent.
On the supply chain side, for instance, the report describes a scenario where an organized crime group manages to install a bank-password keystroke logger in the software distribution image of a notebook manufacturer. Such an event could cause considerable business disruptions and loss of consumer confidence, the report noted. Attacks against the supply chain can also manifest themselves physically, such as when the flow of materials required for manufacturing hardware becomes limited, the report noted.
Similarly, on the DNS (Domain Name Systems) infrastructure front, an attacker could try to establish an alternate Internet root to which DNS inquiries could be diverted, the report warned. An alternate Internet root server that denied service for financial transactions could undermine U.S. economic stability and security, the report cautioned. In similar fashion, large scale denial-of-service attacks, Web re-directs and spoofing attacks on payment processing and e-commerce companies could have cascading effects on consumers, businesses and government entities that rely on such services, the report said.
For the most part though, measures are already in place or are being planned that mitigate the likelihood of such high-consequence disruptions, according to experts at the DHS and IT-SCC who performed the risk assessment. On the supply chain side for instance, while the consequences of an untrustworthy component entering the distribution chain are high, the likelihood of this scenario playing out is low. That s because of the use of sophisticated sourcing strategies, supply chain monitoring processes and product recall capabilities.
