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Jewish World Review Feb. 6, 2001 / 13 Shevat, 5761

DAN EGBERT

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Meet the men who fight information wars

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- Eight months ago, engineers at Cisco Systems' RTP site faced an urgent problem they couldn't fix alone: A customer's communications network was under attack. A tidal wave of malicious Internet messages - meant to paralyze the network gear of the customer - were pouring in from overseas, making it hard to identify the source of the attack.

GregoryAkers was called in.

Akers, vice president in charge of the 350 employees in Cisco's "tactical assistance center," led efforts to "stop the bleeding," determine where the attack originated and stop it. "I'll be brought in on new attacks if multiple agencies and customers are involved and orchestrate their response to the situation," he said.

That kind of expertise has vaulted Akers to the forefront of a new national security effort - information warfare.

Two years ago, President Clinton called for industry organizations to help police the communications networks that government and industry increasingly depend on - and which are a tempting target of cyber-attack from thrill-seeking hackers and international terrorists.

The highly publicized denial-of-service attacks against Yahoo! and eBay last February reaffirmed the need for telecommunications companies to cooperate. The Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center, or IT-ISAC, was formed in January.

Akers was tapped to be the vice president of the organization, whose members include the biggest technology companies in the United States.

"Our purpose is to keep the shipping lanes of commerce open," Akers said.

Several similar organizations have been formed in the past for specific industries and the Y2K threat. But IT-ISAC is supposed to be the rapid response team called in when the threat spans the global tangle of communications networks, as well as the competing interests of American companies and U.S. government agencies.

In his role with the organization, Akers manages collection and dissemination of information to combat computer viruses and denial-of-service attacks to members of IT-ISAC, and helps perform triage on systems that are under attack. But that's the easy part. He also must convince members - many of whom are fierce competitors - to share information, both with one another and with law enforcement officials.

"The private sector is very suspicious of law enforcement," which could make participation in the group challenging, said Mark Rasch, senior vice president for Global Integrity, a security firm in Reston, Va., which is participating in an ISAC organization for the financial industry.

"It's necessary to get the information out there, but there's a lot of devil in the details.

How much participation do they really have? Companies don't like sharing with anybody else that they are having security problems."

If Richard Clarke has his way, the public will never know the particulars of the attacks. Clarke, Clinton's top counter-terrorism official (whom the Bush administration has invited to stay on through the transition period) wants communication between IT-ISAC and the government to be exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

And that could renew concerns about privacy and IT-ISAC's potential to become a Big Brother arm of the government, particularly in light of the controversy surrounding Carnivore - the Federal Bureau of Investigation's computer program aimed at tapping e-mail correspondence. Several Internet service providers objected to the program, calling it a major invasion of privacy.

Akers is careful about characterizing IT-ISAC's relationship with law enforcement and the military. IT-ISAC won't take part in any war games or exercises to test military responsiveness to an attack, he said. Right now, the way information is passed from the organization to the government, and how long it is kept secret, is a "gentleman's agreement," Akers said, but formal rules should be adopted soon.

"We want to make sure there are no overtones for this organization - we don't want it to become an extension of a government agency."

Dan Egbert writes for the Raleigh News & Observer. Comment by clicking here.

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