Time To Enlist A National Guard For It?
Military emergency management officials, speaking at the recent Norwich University e-ProtectIT conference, said the United States is not prepared to recover quickly should a major cyberterrorism attack take place. They also say that such an attack might require government mobilization of IT professionals.
Retired Army National Guard Maj. Gen. Jack D’Araujo suggested the possibility of a cyber national guard to react to attacks, noting that there is no existing official chain of command for such an organization. D’Araujo says, “We’re really plowing some new ground. We flat-out aren’t prepared to deal with it.”
Former National Computer Security Center director Patrick Gallagher said that IT community members do know what to do during a cyberattack, but they lack leadership. Gallagher says that “we have network groups who can and do talk to each other and speak a similar language and have the same training. What we need is the leadership to pull that together.”
Qovia vice president Pierce Reid pointed out that since no cyberdisaster has yet taken place, it is not known what will be required or how fast damage can be fixed.
The Cyber Security Early Warning Task Force recently issued a report urging the creation of an early-warning network and a CERT-run national crisis coordination center to collect attack information and issue warnings.
Information-sharing systems already exist, but they do not have official powers, D’Araujo said, and many companies are reluctant to share information.
Norwich CIO Phil Sussman, who led a seminar on network security, says even minor attacks “will shake confidence in the network itself with a series of things people expected but are no longer there.”
U.S. Marine Gen. Commendant Alfred Gray says IT professionals must get “street-wise” and examine their systems the way attackers do to look for cracks and seams in their operations.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from the Network World (03/29/04) Vol. 21, No. 13, P. 8; Greene, Tim .