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Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2003

The U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team is a partnership between the department and a federally funded computer security center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

The launch comes after computer users all over the world were struck by two self-replicating programs, or "worms," that exploited a security hole in the Windows operating system. According to evidence at a congressional hearing last week, the Sobig and Loveboat worms caused several billion dollars worth of damage in repair costs and lost productivity.

At a breakfast for software executives, Homeland Security Infrastructure chief Robert Liscouski named Amit Yoran, a vice president of Symantec, who make the widely used anti-virus software Norton, to head up the department's new National Cyber Security Division and oversee the partnership with Carnegie Mellon.

Yoran, who had previously worked as the Pentagon's network security manager, has a good reputation in the industry. "He is very highly regarded," Will Rodger of the Computer and Communications Industry Association told United Press International.

Monitoring the Internet

The new emergency team, known as US-CERT, will monitor the Internet 24 hours a day, looking for the signs of cyberattacks like the Sobig worm. US-CERT has a target to respond to such threats within 30 minutes, by issuing alerts, Homeland Security Department spokeswoman Rachael Sunbarger told UPI.

She said the department would be looking to recruit more partners from the private sector to expand their capability, adding that the goal was to work with the computer industry to speed and strengthen their response.

But some critics suggested that the new initiative was missing the point slightly.

"Warning people about threats and vulnerabilities is great," said Rodger, "but the larger question is how should we be dealing with these vulnerabilities in the first place."

Some experts say that the primacy of a single operating system -- Windows is used by the vast majority of computers connected to the Internet -- is inherently a security risk, since any vulnerabilities in it can be exploited on a huge scale.

"We've not yet heard from the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) about how we're going to deal with this problem of monoculture in the network. ... We need to get diversity," says Rodger. His organization, the CCIA, numbers among its many members several of Microsoft's competitors as well as several of its partners.

"Crucially, the government must challenge the marketplace to build more secure products, and should set a gold standard for security. There's no such thing as complete security, but there are ways to improve it, and (the government) should insist that these higher standards be used, when appropriate."

Copyright 2003 United Press International

All rights reserved.

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