14 DAY TRIAL // The Internet environment, as far as hacker attacks go, has come a long way since the early days, when a single individual would try to hack into a secure network just for the fun of the experience. Over the past few years, cyberattacks have become a very effective way of targeting an enemy nation, without actually having to declare war. In such circumstances, the country behind the attacks most often still maintains diplomatic relations with the one it has attacked, and even publicly condones the actions.
Armed with this knowledge, the Pentagon is currently on the verge of developing a center where its officers and other employees will be able to play highly-realistic electronic war games, in a bid to simulate the ways in which hackers could attempt to breach the server security in the future. The Pentagon is working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for this project, which has been dubbed the National Cyber Range (NCR).
The NCR will act like a complete simulator, in that it will mimic all the devices that hackers may ponder using an all-out attack against American servers, by the civilian, governmental or military. In addition to simulating the technical conditions of an attack, the Range will also attempt to get a glimpse of the behavior of the people behind it.
Thus far, important cyberattacks have been registered in the former-Soviet Republic of Estonia, which has been the target of Russian hackers, in the US and the UK, when Chinese hackers have attacked various sites and knocked them off temporarily, and in Georgia, when the Russian invasion has been accompanied by country-wide Internet outages. And, in January 2009, Kyrgyzstan has been the target of another Russian cyberattack, when both of its largest ISPs have been threatened.
“We are largely blind and ignorant of how to protect ourselves against cyberattacks. Advanced threats continue to evade deployed solutions. They have fantastic engineering resources and can develop customized and very powerful ones,” Amit Yoran, who is a security expert at NetWitness, an electronic security company from Herndon, in Virginia, told during recent cybersecurity conference in London.