London conference highlights need to deal with cyber threats
17.04.2008
LONDON, Apr 17, BNS - Senior Estonian Defense Ministry official Christian-Marc Liflander attended a security conference here on Wednesday where international experts called for greater cooperation to fight threats to computer networks but differed on the definition of cyberterrorism.
Liflander, deputy secretary general of the Estonian Defense Ministry for defense policy, said at the conference at the Royal United Services Institute that sustained electronic attacks on his country last year came both from crude hackers and from sophisticated "cyberterrorists" remotely manipulating zombie computers known as botnets, Reuters reported.
"I would say we have entered an era of cyber terror and perhaps even of cyber war," Liflander said.
He said the botnet attacks against Estonian servers last year came from computers in 76 different countries and it was hard to prove who sponsored them. "What we have is just a gazillion IP (Internet Protocol) addresses that don't prove anything."
The effect was to paralyse websites and cause severe disruption to key services such as banking, in a country with one of the highest levels of Internet usage in the world.
Stephen Cummings, director of the British government's Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure, said he had seen no evidence to suggest terrorists were bent on using cyberattacks to generate the same devastating impact as their physical attacks.
"I think discussion of cyberterrorism distracts our attention from the more pressing terrorist threats, which are still physical," he said in a presentation which included a slide saying "Cyberterrorism is a myth".
Talk of cyberterrorism could distract people from addressing the real risks from malicious electronic attacks, he said. "Who knows, if we all talk about cyberterrorism enough, maybe the terrorists will twig on to its potential in a way we wouldn't want them to."
Despite the differences over terminology, officials stressed the need for international collaboration.
"No one country can stand alone in facing cyberattacks and threats. Cyberspace is borderless and the attack usually does not originate from within," Husin Jazri, director of CyberSecurity Malaysia, told Reuters.
He said governments and their computer emergency response teams needed to set up "pre-emptive arrangements" to cope with potential attacks.
Estonia, following last year's crisis, has urged the European Union to harmonize laws against cyberattacks to make it easier to prosecute those behind them.
Baltic News Service
 
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