United States ill-prepared for skyrocketing cyberattacks against critical infrastructure

Cyberattacks against the United States’ critical infrastructure are increasing, but even the Department of Homeland Security is reporting that the country is ill-prepared to respond.

America’s cyberdefense situation is in need of improvement, according at least to a newsletter published by the Homeland Security Department’s Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, the ICS-CERT Monitor [PDF].

In the late-2012 edition of the Monitor, cyber experts working for the United States government confirm that as attacks waged against America’s essential sectors are on the rise, the number of qualified personnel able to respond is hardly adequate.

Between October 1, 2011 and September of last year, ICE-CERT claims to have received and responded to 198 cyber incidents as reported by asset owners and industry partners. In an analysis of the report by CNN, they report that the figure for Fiscal Year 2012 is 52 percent larger than the year before.

Elsewhere in the Monitor, ICE-CERT quotes noted security expert Alan Paller as saying that there are no more than 20 individuals in the entire country that could counter a substantial attack against the States’ cyber infrastructure.
“Paller believes there are only 18 to 20 people in the whole country qualified to protect the nation’s infrastructure from a concerted cyberattack,” the Monitor says, quoting from a Wall Street Journal article published in November.
“That’s an incredible small number of people considering the hundreds of thousands of engineers working in the private, public and military sectors,” says the Journal.

Of those nearly 200 incidents reported to DHS, several resulted in successful break-ins. In one example given of a power generation facility in the US, the Monitor says DHS employees identified malware installed on their systems that were so sophisticated that they posed the possibility of a very real disaster to the plant’s control environment.

Read more: United States ill-prepared for skyrocketing cyberattacks against critical infrastructure — RT