Escalating tensions between the U.S. and Iraq, as well as global protests over the weekend, have prompted government officials to ask for increased awareness of possible terrorist threats in all areas of life, including the Internet.
Last week, President Bush announced the “National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace” which details how the government will protect the U.S. from terrorists attacking national infrastructures through cyberspace.
“We must act to reduce our vulnerabilities to these threats before they can be exploited to damage the cyber systems supporting our nation’s critical infrastructures,” Bush said.
Bush said the Internet is not only itself an infrastructure, but is used to connect other infrastructures such as banking, telecommunications, energy and transportation.
Also last week the National Infrastructure Protection Center (NIPC) issued an advisory to network managers across the country to be on a close lookout for global Internet hacking activities, which they have recently found to escalate during times of international tension.
The NIPC is a combined effort of government agencies to monitor and protect the internal systems of the United States, including banking, energy, telecommunications and computer systems and the Internet. The warning said Internet terrorists might hack systems for a number of motivations, including to further activism in favor of Iraq’s position or in criticism of the U.S.
The University of Wisconsin’s Division of Information Technology (DoIT), has a team in place to respond to hacker activity, global or domestic.
The Badger Incident Response Team, or BadgIRT, is a group of technical experts in a variety of different departments who are highly aware of suspicious Internet activity, according to Brian Rust of DoIT.
“They try and monitor what’s going on nationally and also look for viruses and people who are trying to cause problems for our system,” Rust said.
BadgIRT also provides solutions to system disruptions. Rust said when the Klez virus attacked the UW network last year, BadgIRT developed and posted a patch, or downloadable fix, for the virus quickly.
“If someone is doing port scanning on the network to try and detect our vulnerabilities, this group of people take action to prevent problems for UW,” Rust said. “The group can track that person, whether it is an international terrorist, a hacker or a student from another campus.”
Rust said tracking a hacker depends on how good the hacker was at covering their tracks, and that just like in any other crime, investigators look for clues as to the perpetrator’s identity and location.
In addition to tracking hackers from around the world, BadgIRT also monitors people misusing Internet connections on the UW campus.
“Our security is kept fairly busy between hacking, abuse of campus connections or someone from another part of the world trying to get into the system,” Rust said.
Informational technologies security groups such as BadgIRT are typical of large college campuses. Rust said BadgIRT works with other universities’ Internet security as well as law enforcement agencies. BadgIRT doesn’t concern itself with the motives or punishment of hackers, which is left up to criminal authorities.
Rust said such a security group performed the necessary function of protecting UW systems, which contain everything from grade reports and employment records to UW Hospital patient information.
“The message to people who engage in supposed secret hacking activities is that they are kidding themselves if they think no one knows about it,” Rust said.
