jueves, 30 de abril de 2015

jueves, abril 30, 2015
NSA veteran chief fears crippling cyber-attack on Western energy infrastructure

The West lacks a shield against formidable foes and is losing the battle against Jihadi terrorism as chaos spreads across the Middle East

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Houston

8:29PM BST 26 Apr 2015

Keith Alexander speaks during a Bloomberg West television interview in San Francisco
Gen Alexander warned that the US and it allies have failed to check the advance of Islamic State Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
 
 
The West is losing the worldwide fight against jihadist terrorism and faces mounting risks of a systemic cyber-assault by extremely capable enemies, the former chief of the National Security Agency has warned.
 

"The greatest risk is a catastrophic attack on the energy infrastructure. We are not prepared for that," said General Keith Alexander, who has led the US battle against cyber-threats for much of the last decade.
 

Gen Alexander said the "doomsday" scenario for the West is a hi-tech blitz on refineries, power stations, and the electric grid, perhaps accompanied by a paralysing blow to the payments nexus of the major banks.
 
"We need something like an integrated air-defence system for the whole energy sector," he said, speaking at a private dinner held by IHS CERAWeek in Texas.
 
More insidiously, there is now a systematic effort by state-backed hacking teams to steal technology from Western companies. "This is the biggest wealth transfer in history," he said.
 
Gen Alexander warned that the US and it allies have failed to check the advance of Islamic State (Isil) or its expanding network of franchises across the Middle East. The West is increasingly at risk of a strategic defeat in the region. "It is getting worse. Twenty-five countries are now unstable, just look at Yemen," he said.

Saudi-led air strikes against the Shia Houthi rebels in Yemen have killed over 1,000 civilian and displaced 150,000, without restoring any semblance of political order. A particularly aggressive faction of the Jihadi nexus – al-Qaeda in the Arabian Penisula – has exploited the crisis to free its prisoners and seize the country's fifth biggest city.

The French oil group Total has suspended operations in Yemen, cutting off 30pc of the state's budget revenues. The country risks becoming another failed side along the lines of Libya.

Diplomats warn that the crisis evolved into a Sunni-Shia proxy war between Iran and the Saudis, with the risk of a boomerang back into Saudi Arabia itself, where a restive Shia minority is sitting on the world's biggest oil field.




Gen Alexander, who served as head of US Cyber Command as well as director of the electronic eavesdropping agency, listed five countries able to conduct cyber-warfare at the highest level: the US, UK, Israel, Russia, and surprisingly Iran.

He did not include North Korea, describing the cyber-sabotage of Sony last year as relatively primitive. The attack could have been prevented with early warning sensors that pick up changes in the "behaviour" of computer systems.

China clearly has first-rate hackers, allegedly concentrated at a 2,000-strong cell of the People's Liberation Army in Shanghai. The current NSA chief Michael Rogers testified late last year that China is capable of cyber-attacks that could cause "catastrophic failures" of the water system or the electricity grid.

Hank Paulson, the former US Treasury Secretary and author of a new book entitled "Dealing With China", told the CERAWeek conference that Chinese hackers have been stealing intellectual property on a large scale.

“That’s the most quarrelsome issue because it plays to the common perception that China doesn’t play fair. US companies have got to do a better job of hardening their systems,” he said.

There is no suggestion that China has an intention to use its power to damage US infrastructure. NSA officials are less confident that Iran will show self-restraint.

The Iranians revealed their skill in August 2012 with a taunting virus attack on Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil giant. Hackers erased most of the company's emails and documents, leaving an image of a burning American flag on the computer system as their calling card. There was a similar attack on Qatar's state-energy group RasGas.

The action was a form or retaliation for economic sanctions against Iran, but also a warning shot to Riyadh in an escalating battle for Mid-East dominance by the two regional superpowers. It is highly pertinent today given comments by leading figures in Tehran that the Saudis will be "punished" for their decision to drive down the price of oil.
 
A report by the cybersecurity firm Cylance Corp claimed that Iran's experts have hacked into the email systems of the US navy and marines, as well as other critical computer systems in Britain, France, and Germany.

The American Enterprise Institute has issued its own report concluding that the nuclear deal with Iran will merely enable the country to step up its step up its attacks. "It would be comforting to imagine that a new era of détente will end this cyber arms race. There is, unfortunately, no reason to believe that that will be the case," it said.

Gen Alexander remains defiantly unapologetic about the NSA's collection of metadata on US citizens for anti-terrorism purposes – exposed by NSA contractor Edward Snowden – conceding only that the agency did not act quickly enough to "get out in front" and defend itself.

He said the programme had been approved by the courts, both parties in Congress, and the White House. "The courts oversaw what we were doing every step of the way," he said.

Gen Alexander instructed the NSA's staff to sit down with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) when the storm hit – after the ACLU had a filed a lawsuit – and explain exactly what the agency had been doing and why. "We gave the ACLU 100pc," he said.

The overtures appear to have been partially successful, if too late to stop a public relations disaster.

The civil liberties watchdog concluded that America's spies had been acting with professional integrity.

However, the ACLU continues to insist that the "surveillance superstructure" established by the US Patriot Act, FISA Amendments, and Executive Order 12.333, together strike "at the core of our rights to privacy, free speech, and association."

"History has shown that powerful, secret surveillance tools will almost certainly be abused for political ends," it said.

Gen Alexander said he learned from a tip-off days in advance that Mr Snowden was about to expose a vast cache of NSA files, and is not yet convinced that he was acting alone. "Why did he go to Russia? We still have a lot of suspicions about his motives," he said.

0 comments:

Publicar un comentario