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.
