FBI Suspects Terrorists Are Exploring Cyber Attacks

According to a WSJ report today, The FBI is looking at groups suspected of having links to al Qaeda who have shown an interest in mounting an attack on computer systems that control critical U.S. infrastructure.

While there is no evidence that terrorist groups have developed sophisticated cyber-attack capabilities yet, a lack of security protections in U.S. computer software increases the likelihood that terrorists could execute attacks in the future, an official warned.

If terrorists were to amass such capabilities, they would be wielded with “destructive and deadly intent,” Steven Chabinsky, deputy assistant director of the FBI’s Cyber Division, told the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday.

“The FBI is aware of and investigating individuals who are affiliated with or sympathetic to al Qaeda who have recognized and discussed the vulnerabilities of the U.S. infrastructure to cyber-attack,” Mr. Chabinsky told the committee, without providing details.

Such infrastructure could include power grids and transportation systems.

The control systems of U.S. infrastructure as well as money transfers are now connected directly or indirectly to the Internet. Hackers have been able to penetrate computer systems running components of the U.S. electric grid as well as divert bank transfers.

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DHS Reviewing Vulnerability in West Coast Power Grid

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is looking at a report by a research scientist in China that shows how a well-placed attack against a small power subnetwork could trigger a cascading failure of the entire West Coast power grid.

Jian-Wei Wang, a network analyst at China’s Dalian University of Technology, used publicly available information to model how the West Coast power grid and its component subnetworks are connected. Wang and another colleague then investigated how a major outage in one subnetwork would affect adjacent subnetworks, according to an article in New Scientist.

The aim of the research was to study potential weak spots on the West Coast grid, where an outage on one subnetwork would result in a cascading failure across the entire network. A cascading failure occurs when an outage on one network results in an adjacent network becoming overloaded, triggering a similar set of failures across the entire network. The massive blackouts in the Northeast in August 2003, which affected close to 10 million, were the result of such a cascading failure.

Wang’s research was expected to show that an outage in a heavily loaded network would result in smaller surrounding networks becoming overwhelmed and causing cascading blackouts. Instead, what the research showed was that under certain conditions, an attacker targeting a lightly loaded subnetwork would be able to cause far more of the grid to trip and fail, New Scientist reported quoting Wang. The article does not describe Wang’s research (paid subscription required) or any further details of the attack.

Wang did not reply to an e-mailed request for comment seeking details on the report.

Wang’s report, which appears to have been largely overlooked until the publication of the New Scientist article last week, was completed last November and has been available online since March.

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