Monday 28 February 2000

Military sets up anti-hacker unit

Team of 14 based in Ottawa DAVID PUGLIESE Ottawa Citizen

The Department of National Defence has declared war on Internet hackers by creating a new unit to help hunt down cyberspace intruders.

A team of scientists and computer specialists has been formed at Defence Research Establishment Ottawa to devise new protective measures. To that end, they will imitate the hackers, creating new computer viruses to study and then design defences against. At the same time, they will develop new ways to track down hackers, said Prakash Bhartia, director-general of the facility.

"We are trying to do more of the forward-looking R and D," Bhartia said. "This is the type of virus you may meet five years down the road. This is what the trend is in virus development, intrusion systems, and the vulnerability of new computers."

Bhartia said 14 people were hired last year for the new team. By July he hopes to have 20 members in place. They have already simulated in their labs the recent hack attack that disabled Yahoo.com, eBay and other U.S. sites, in order to better understand how it was created.

Reports link a Canadian who goes by the Internet name "mafiaboy" to the attacks, and the FBI believes one or more Canadian servers were used to launch the attack.

Although the Defence computer team's main task is to protect Canadian Forces information systems, it will also do work for a planned national co-ordination centre to fight off hacker attacks on key Canadian computer systems.

Planning for that centre is still several years from becoming reality, said John Leggat, the Defence Department's chief of research and development.

Chemical, Biological Defence Also Planned

Leggat said that centre would also deal with other threats to Canada, such as chemical or biological attacks.

He said the main problem with hack attacks is that viruses are simple to design and can cause a lot of damage to a network. Federal computers, including those of the RCMP, Industry Canada, Human Resources and the spy agency, Communications Security Establishment, have all been attacked.

The sites of at least nine federal agencies, as well as several provincial institutions, were penetrated and altered by hackers in 1999. In all, 44 hack attacks were documented - believed to be only a fraction of the actual total.

"We are pretty vulnerable," acknowledges Bhartia. "Luckily these (attacks) are not too serious, because most of it involved regular information. But people could conceivably hack into payroll. Or send themselves out a (government) cheque. Those are the things that really worry us."

The Defence Department already has a computer response team to deal with attacks on its systems, but it cannot track who launched the attack, said Bhartia. That's where his unit would come in.

Bhartia said that, as the military becomes more reliant on computers, it has become keenly aware that attacks could hurt the flow of battlefield information.

Although the new team does research into creating viruses, the Canadian Forces says it would not use those to cripple the computer networks of other counties. "We are not authorized to use these in offensive measures," Bhartia said.

http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/pages/000228/3668175.html

-- Jen Bunker (jen@bunkergroup.com), February 29, 2000