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OCTOBER 1, 2001 SPECIAL REPORT: TECH, AFTER THE ATTACK A Battle-Ready Net? It's not there yet. Plenty needs to be done to safeguard it against either a physical assault or a cyber attack
While the attack showed that, under certain circumstances, the Net may be more resilient than the phone system, it's also true that it did so well because no one tried to take it out. What if the terrorists had taken direct aim at the U.S. portion of the Internet as part of a broader coordinated attack -- one that no longer seems far-fetched? Although today's Net is clearly much more reliable than that of a few years ago, it still has major failure points that need to be shored up before it's battle-ready. Most of these hotels are built to withstand major bomb blasts. Yet the very concentration of key equipment in these facilities makes them potential weak links. "If you hit 60 Hudson St. and 111 8th Ave. in New York City, you take out most of our Atlantic connectivity for the entire Internet," says Stefan Savage, the chief scientist for Asta Networks, a Seattle company that helps ISPs fight off malicious assaults. While a coordinated physical attack could create such problems, concentrated cyber terrorism aimed at the backbone routers in these hotels could prove even more devastating. "The real risk isn't from traditional terrorism that we saw on Sept. 11," says Brian Fink, senior vice-president at telecom and fiber provider Global Crossing. The rapid spread of the Code Red worm in July and the Nimda worm/virus two months later showed how easy it remains to quickly distribute damaging software around the Net. DIGITAL GRIDLOCK. Those infections contaminated hundreds of thousands of systems, according to security experts -- and the damage could have been worse. Although Nimda and Code Red clogged networks and defaced Web pages, they weren't designed to do permanent damage. With some relatively simple modifications to their computer code, however, these digital pathogens could have taken down the Internet for an extended period. How? By commanding thousands of compromised machines to direct heaps of traffic at the backbone routers that serve as air-traffic controllers for the Web. Such so-called denial-of-service attacks have already proved devastating to individual companies -- they blocked access to key Microsoft sites last January, for instance -- though they've never brought down the entire Net. Not yet, anyway. But the proliferation of broadband connectivity in homes makes such an attack more possible than ever. In part, because of the speed at which broadband moves data, "...if you get Code Red-style penetration, you are talking about taking over enough machines to produce multiterabit request traffic," explains Savage, whose company builds equipment to attempt to fend off such attacks. "You can shut down anyone's backbone with that." ROUTER MAVENS. Brute force may not be the only way to subvert the Net. Should hackers find a hole in the software that runs these systems, they could feed the Web's backbone routers incorrect information and misdirect data traffic. Impossible? Until recently, it seemed so. Router technology was relatively obscure and hard to use. And the number of people with knowledge of the specialized operating systems and software that runs these machines was relatively small. That's changing, and not necessarily for the better. Thanks to six-figure programmer salaries and a plethora of public instructional materials from router heavyweights Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, a lot more people now know the workings of these data traffic cops. "We have been focusing on viruses that relate to the public Internet, but you also have secure communications systems that are more secure than the Internet but are not completely sheltered," says Mark Wilson, a vice-president for corporate strategy at telecommunications equipment maker Ericsson. Another example of the Net's vulnerability showed up last July -- in, of all places, a Civil War-era train tunnel beneath Baltimore. A fire there melted a number of key fiber-optic cables and noticeably slowed traffic on the Net for several days. If the blaze had occurred five years ago, when railroad right-of-ways were a primary path for data carriers, the Internet might have slowed even more. INSUFFICIENT BACKUP. Fiber routes now follow not just railroads but also highways, power grids, and gas pipelines. While few single points of failure remain, the impact of multiple failures at bridges, tunnels, or pipelines is anybody's guess. That has spurred demand for better redundancy than simply having two cables running out of a building instead of one. "Diversity is important. Customers are more aware of carriers' physical routing of fiber than they were five years ago. Now, customers really want to see where you're located," says Jack Waters, chief technology officer at telecom and data transport company Level 3. A final place where the physical safety of the Internet falls short is in metropolitan areas. In most cities, the Baby Bells still control huge chunks of fiber linkages that have insufficient backup systems, according to industry experts. While failures in one city rarely affect the entire country, they could be a nuisance for millions of people and thousands of businesses. Disruptions of that size also can cause much wider ripples for the Net -- as the World Trade Center disaster nearly did. Only through quick action did several ISPs and data-intensive companies in lower Manhattan find alternate locations -- and survive the disabling of Verizon's operations center there. HARD QUESTIONS. Because of that near miss, many companies are now expressing renewed interest in wireless data-backup systems that might improve Net resilience in local areas. Those could include technologies that might shoot data from rooftop to rooftop using laser beams or broadcast it over portions of the radio spectrum. "Then, if you were ever to physically lose the cable, you'd have a backup technology that enables you to continue to run your business," says Global Crossing's Fink. Mitigating potential threats to the Net is no easy task. In fact, absolute prevention of cyber attacks would require far greater insight into the architecture and traffic patterns of the Web than anyone now has. Moreover, building additional fiber networks to augment the Net's redundancy is something the capital markets won't support right now, given telecom's overcapacity and economic woes. Still, companies dependent on the Net have started to ask hard questions that may spur broader efforts to improve reliability. "What the industry promised for the last year or two was almost 100% uptime," says Jay Adelson, chief technology office of Equinix, a company that provides neutral exchanges. "That was a magical number. After this incident, folks are going back and looking again to prove to themselves the reliability is there." That's a smart move in a world where coordinated attacks have become a harsh reality and the inconceivable has become plausible.  By Alex Salkever in New York Get BusinessWeek directly on your desktop with our RSS feeds.  Add BusinessWeek news to your Web site with our headline feed. Click to buy an e-print or reprint of a BusinessWeek or BusinessWeek Online story or video. To subscribe online to BusinessWeek magazine, please click here. Learn more, go to the BusinessWeekOnline home page  | | OCTOBER |
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