Top U.S. cyber official: cyber threat poses existential threat to U.S.

Cyber attacks threaten the “very existence” of the United States, according to a senior FBI official charged with worrying about such things. “The cyber threat can be an existential threat — meaning it can challenge our country’s very existence, or significantly alter our nation’s potential,” Steven Chabinsky was quoted by Computerworld as telling a gathering of government IT officials at the Federal Office Systems Exposition (FOSE) in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday. “How we rise to the cybersecurity challenge will determine whether our nation’s best days are ahead of us or behind us,” he added.

Chabinsky is the assistant deputy director of national intelligence for cyber, the chair of the National Cyber Study Group, and the director of the Joint Interagency Cyber Task Force.

Chabinsky did not mince words: “I am convinced that given enough time, motivation and funding,” he said, “a determined adversary will always — always — be able to penetrate a targeted system.”

Rik Myslewski writes that cyber-terrorism Chabinsky’s top priority, but he is also worried about cyber-snooping. His concerns include foreign agents and criminals who “seek every day to steal our state secrets and private sector intellectual property, sometimes for the purpose of undermining the stability of our government by weakening our economic or military supremacy.”

Chabinsky believes that progress is being made on cybercrime — he said that although many cyber-criminals believe that they will never be caught and convicted, “increasingly, they are wrong.”

The FBI isn’t the only U.S. agency actively pursuing cyber-security. As InformationWeek pointed out on Monday, DHS is teaming up with the National Security Agency (NSA) to test the latest iteration of the government’s “Einstein” intrusion-detection system (IDS). The new system, Einstein 3 (pdf), will ratchet-up the previous IDS efforts, using NSA-developed and commercial technology to add intrusion-protection system (IPS) capabilities. As part of Einstein 3, real-time full-packet inspection and what the agencies call “threat-based decision-making” will monitor and protect traffic moving in and out of civilian executive-branch agency networks.

Myslewski quotes DHS to say that the cyber-threats to be detected and prevented include phishing, IP spoofing, botnets, denials of service, distributed denials of service, man-in-the-middle attacks, and “the insertion of other types of malware.”

As the Wall Street Journal noted when details of Einstein 3 testing were released earlier this month, the IDS and IPS powers of the effort understandably give rise to privacy concerns — especially in light of the troubles the previous U.S. administration found itself in when details of its secret snooping came to light.

As the WSJ reported, when the Obama administration’s cyber-security chief Howard Schmidt spoke to the RSA conference a few weeks back he said that allaying privacy concerns was one of his top priorities: “We’re really paying attention, and we get it,” he told that gathering.

Details of the efforts being made to assuage privacy concerns can be found in the DHS’s 19-page Privacy Impact Assessment (pdf) for the Einstein 3 testing, which includes assurances that “No agency traffic is collected or retained … unless it is associated with a cyber threat. Other agency traffic is not stored.”