The Hindu Business Line : `Security attack risks rising with connectivity'

Coimbatore March 11 Network architecture as of today is complicated and computer scientists are fully aware that reducing the complexity is the most important task in the design of software and systems. What has happened instead is that systems are abound with complex features that hackers control with ease.

"Twenty years ago, we did not know how to connect computers. Today, we do not know how to separate them," observes Mr Edward Amoroso, Senior Vice-President and Chief Security Officer for AT & T Inc, and author of Cyber Security.

Stating that the situation has become laughable with the advent of Internet technology and Internet protocol, Mr Amoroso has (in his book) pointed out that connectivity between computers has become so extensive that one could be reasonably certain that users of any other computer system would be able to find them, via some network path. "Virtually every computer can be reached over a network from any other computer."

Incidentally, most organisations have so many network connections into and out of their enterprise. The best way to protect the systems from cyber attacks would be to herd all the connections together into traffic gateways, where security devices like firewalls are inserted.

For cyber terrorists or criminals planning an attack on some target infrastructure, remote access to the target's assets is always the key component, says Mr Amoroso.

Citing an instance, he pointed out how his security team mapped out the connectivity built by Government agency engineers. "It was a rat's nest exercise. The team unravelled further into the rat's nest and found a portion of their network completely unprotected — one with direct connections to the Internet!"

Hackers, however, Mr Amoroso notes, figure out ways to go right through or around these firewall-protected gateways. Malicious remote access stemming from employees leaving unnoticed connections to their office computers, engineers creating tough-to-find gateways to the Internet and administrators having a poor understanding of the traffic being allowed in and out of the network can be serious and the recent explosion of wireless networking would only accelerate the complexity.

"The potential for anyone including malicious intruders to scan the local airwaves for connectivity into all sorts of networks is frightening. While network owners can use encryption and access control to deal with this threat, they simply don't bother," says Mr Amoroso.

While conceding that this massive connectivity of computers has increased the risk of security attacks, Mr Amoroso also notes that there are certain strategies to address this issue albeit to a degree. Firewall and intrusion detection systems try to throttle and analyse the traffic into and out of an enterprise; Encryption can be used to protect the data as it passes from one place to another; and software improvements can reduce the number of vulnerabilities resident in end-points, although none of these are even close to perfect.

"The default global decision to simply connect everything to everything else has its security consequences," says Mr Amoroso.

Answering a query, he said `it is not intended to scare people into avoiding technology, but it is irresponsible not to properly represent the associated risks.'