[Infowarrior] - U.S. Pitches 'Phase One' of Net Monitoring Plan at RSA

[Richard Forno]

U.S. To Pitch 'Phase One' of Net Monitoring Plan at RSA
By Ryan Singel EmailApril 08, 2008 | 11:58:43 AMCategories: RSA Conference
Chertoff

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/04/gov-to-pitch-ph.html
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Just how dangerous is the online world?

That question draws some 15,000 security professionals and IT bigwigs to San
Francisco each year for the RSA Conference, taking place this week. There
they learn about the newest threat to corporate networks, and are wooed by
the makers of the newest flavor of corporate firewalls, intrusion detection
devices and biometric doo-dads.

The answer they always get, not surprisingly, is that the online world is
pretty darn dangerous, unless you use our products and services. What's new
this year is that the U.S. government is joining the party with much the
same pitch.  The nation's intelligence and anti-terror agencies are newly
determined to take a more active role in protecting the United States from
cyberattack, and they're seeking new authority to monitor the internet in
order to save it.

Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff is traveling Tuesday to the
conference to pitch a program the Bush administration calls the Cyber
Initiative. Slated for $154 million in funding this year, the plan would put
the National Security Agency and DHS in charge of cybersecurity for all
federal government agencies.

That would mean that the nation's spies -- who began secretly targeting
Americans since shortly after 9/11 -- will be monitoring when Americans
visit the IRS or the Social Security Administration online.

This would mark a significant change in the NSA's defensive
responsibilities, which have historically been limited to locking down
military and classified networks and providing encryption technologies to
soldiers and statesmen. Given that the federal government policy largely
forbids even the use of cookies on government websites, that's a sea change
in how the government monitors Americans' online interactions with the
federal government.

It's also reportedly just the first step in having the nation's most
powerful spy agency begin to take over information security responsibility
for large chunks of the net.  In January, President Bush signed an order,
National Security Presidential Directive 54,  that begins that process. The
details are murky, since the order itself is classified.

To sell the plan to the private sector, Chertoff and other officials will
likely talk about Chinese hackers infiltrating the military's most secure
unclassified servers, and perhaps offer another iteration of the claim that
a serious computer attack against the United States would deal an economic
blow that makes the September 11 terrorist attack look like a parking
ticket.

Beyond the hype, of course, there are some serious threats that will go
under the microscope at RSA -- most prominently the pernicious influence of
botnets, the large collections of compromised Windows machines that are used
for online crime ranging from spam to phishing. The largest of these are
estimated to be hundreds of thousands of computers strong.

But in keeping with the tone set by the United States, botnets are being
recast as the equivalent of a dirty bomb. Consider the title of one panel on
the malware: "Protecting the Homeland: How to Win the BotNet Battle?"

Tune in for ongoing coverage from RSA.