http://atimes.com/media/DE21Ce01.html

By James Borton
May 21, 2002

WASHINGTON - Washington's War Situation Rooms are abuzz these days
with a score of major flashpoints scattered across the globe, from the
Middle East, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Central Asia and North
Korea to Cuba, and has now an issued alert of China's readiness to
launch a cyber attack targeting key government computer systems.

Alarm bells have not stopped ringing at the Central Intelligence
Agency's (CIA) Langley, Virginia, headquarters. The agency has been
under an increasing media assault since September 11 for its
recognized intelligence failures. It is even more distressing for the
multibillion-dollar-funded agency since it is now certain that the
White House had been warned as early as last August that Osama bin
Laden's al-Qaeda agents were seeking to hijack aircraft.

With morale sagging, the ubiquitous and vast CIA appears to be
operating on one overloaded circuit-breaker with its patriotic
director George Tenet prominently in the crosshairs of terrorists and
the US Congress. Incongruous as it seems, another intelligence report
or early warning of an attack on the US is not being taken seriously.
The insightful findings that China is gearing up for a cyber attack on
defense and civilian computer networks in the United States and Taiwan
is being dismissed outright as not potentially injurious to any
computer networks.

The paradox is startling. The Institute for Strategic Studies, run by
the US Army War College, released a classified report as an early
warning directed to all government policy shapers, the Defense
Department, US diplomats and law-enforcement agencies to be vigilant
for Chinese student hackers' efforts some time in early summer to
spread computer viruses to deface sensitive government Internet sites.
This is a disturbingly similar message to that which was issued to
intelligence agencies a month before the devastating attacks on the
Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

"We do use our website for outreach and we are sensitive to its
security. But it's important to put the defacing of Web pages in
perspective. Admittedly it can be done, even with security measures in
place, but it's more akin to vandalism than a security threat," said
Dr Steven Metz, director of research and chairman of the Regional
Strategy and Planning Department at the Strategic Studies Institute at
the US Army War College.

It is precisely this kind of denial of any clear and present danger
from senior sources at the Pentagon and even the CIA that is causing
an increasing firestorm among congressional leaders. This week,
Washington's top lawmakers will be pushing for tougher inquiries about
last year's breakdown in intelligence communication between the CIA
and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

In testimony presented to the US Senate Armed Services Committee last
month, Tenet revealed, "I think we have a deep concern that the
Chinese are also engaging in activities that continue to be inimical
not just to our interests, but that their activity stimulates
secondary activities that only complicate the threat we face."

Code Red: No longer just a threat

No one in Washington has forgotten when Chinese anger spilled over
from the streets into cyberspace to protest the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization's (NATO) bombing three years ago of the Chinese Embassy
in Belgrade resulting in the deaths of three Chinese journalists. At
that time, most of the major Chinese media organizations, including
the People's Daily, CCTV, Xinhua News Agency, Guangming Daily, China
Youth Daily, and Beijing Youth Daily, published extensive coverage of
the street demonstrations against the bombings on their websites.

As a direct result of that international incident, Chinese hackers
broke into the US Department of Energy's website and replaced its
homepage with a note written half in English, half in Chinese, which
read: "We are Chinese hackers who take no cares about politics. But we
can not stand by seeing our Chinese reporters being killed. Whatever
the purpose is NATO, led by the USA, must take absolute
responsibility. You have owed Chinese people a bloody debt which you
must pay for. We won't stop attacking until the war stops."

Only a year ago, a successful Chinese cyber attack aimed directly at
the heart of America's political pulse knocked out the White House's
website for almost four hours. A White House spokesman at that time
refuted the seriousness of the action, stating that "there was no
security breach, and the attack remains under review". Never mind that
it was exactly a year ago, almost in a memorial salute to the Belgrade
bombing of the Chinese Embassy, that Chinese hackers defaced more than
660 sites in the US, according to Michael Cheek from the security firm
iDefense.

US technologies of surveillance, encryption, firewalls, and even
viruses have been willingly transferred to Chinese partners in the
past several years as part of China's budding efforts to enter the New
Economy. Rand Corp's James Mulvenon maintains that such US companies
as Network Associates (McAfee Anti Virus), and Symantec (Norton Anti
Virus) gained entry to China's market by voluntarily providing China's
Public Security Bureau with more than 300 computer viral strains.

Although senior Chinese Internet network officials maintain even today
that a Code Red worm is far too sophisticated for China to have
produced, several senior US analysts strongly disagree and confirm
that the technology to launch cyber attacks has already been
successfully deployed by China. After all, China has already developed
a sophisticated surveillance system to monitor activities on the
Internet. The system, which is similar to the data-recording "black
box" installed in commercial airplanes, will be able to monitor all
communications through the Internet.

"Was there a failure of intelligence?" asked House Minority Leader
Dick Gephardt. "Did the right officials not act on the intelligence in
the proper way? These are things we need to find out." That was the
question raised this past week on Capitol Hill. These legislators were
not addressing these previous Chinese-inflicted cyber attacks, but
rather the enormity of the September 11 tragedy.

Intelligence agency aims to boost image

The intelligence community, in an effort to boost US confidence in
national security, is maneuvering to cast a wider safety net through
the newly refurbished Washington naval complex at the intersection of
Cryptologic Court and Intelligence Way. The Threat Monitoring Center,
housed in a three-story, red-brick building, is an expansive room with
a bank of televisions, numerous workstations with computers and nine
clocks. Although there are still plenty of empty offices and cubicles,
Tom Ridge, the Homeland Security director, states that the facility
will soon be manned by representatives of more than a dozen federal
agencies, among them the CIA, the FBI, the departments of Energy,
Transportation and State and the National Security Agency, posted to
alert Americans of any future terrorist attacks. That warning shot has
already been issued and few Americans are listening. A report produced
by the Strategic Studies Institute titled "Chinese Information
Warfare: A Phantom or Emerging Threat?" demonstrates that China has
more than an intense and acute fascination with information warfare
(IW). Both the National Security Council and the CIA believe that the
potential advances in Chinese IW capabilities have direct implications
for US national security. Exhaustive research of Chinese
information-warfare literature confirms a goal of information
dominance.

"The Chinese military views cyberwarfare as a way to overcome
America's superiority," claims Toshi Yoshihara, a research fellow on
security issues with the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysts and
doctoral candidate at Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Two years ago, John Serabian, the CIA's information operations manger,
revealed in written testimony presented to the Joint Economic
Committee that the US was indeed vulnerable to a major cyber attack
from China's military inflicting much more injury than just defacing
government websites, but creating truly damaging interruptions to the
national economy and infrastructure. The "Cyber Terrorism Threat"
report does include a carefully worded assessment that the Chinese
government or military currently lacks the ability to conduct this
intended goal of disrupting Taiwanese computer systems or US military
logistics.

Some close observers of America's intelligence community believe it is
precisely this kind of mixed information, laced with naivete and
denial, that fits squarely into the demands made by Senator Richard
Shelby, the Alabama Republican who serves as vice chairman of the
Senate Intelligence Committee, that a leadership shakeup may be
required soon at the CIA.

Just as America experienced in 1993 at the World Trade Center a
shocking preview of what the entire world gravely witnessed a few
years later on September 11, 2001, the next Code Red worm may prove to
be much more than just a mere nuisance to government websites.

*==============================================================*
"Communications without intelligence is noise; Intelligence
without communications is irrelevant." Gen Alfred. M. Gray, USMC
================================================================
C4I.org - Computer Security, & Intelligence - http://www.c4i.org
*==============================================================*

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