Stories about: Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office

President Bush's newly installed cybersecurity czar, Richard Clarke, vowed Tuesday to enhance ways in which government and industry safeguard critical infrastructures against terrorism, but observers say hurdles stand in the way of full cooperation.

In a perfect world, a bit of common sense and a dash of due diligence would protect us from hackers, saboteurs and the common cold. Well, the world isn't perfect, and we know we can never be completely secure.

Even with strong security, e-business risk is a fact of life in today's interconnected business world. But the fundamental problem with managing this new form of business risk, say IT managers, is that there are no metrics and no standards to measure the level of risk.

The Internet Software Consortium (ISC), which develops the server software most commonly used to direct traffic on the Web, is moving to create a fee-based information-sharing club that officials at the organization said is meant to give software vendors and other companies early warnings about security holes affecting its products.

It's April Fool's Day, 2002. Glitches in air traffic controller screens nearly cause a collision above New York's LaGuardia Airport. Two weeks later, California Independent System Operator Corp., which controls California's power grid, somehow misplaces an electrical energy order to Southern California Edison, leaving two-thirds of San Diego in the dark. Then in May, a high-power microwave burst fries the electronics at an abortion clinic in Virginia.

Three years ago, when companies everywhere were competing frantically for mainframe programmers to fix the Y2K bug, Dan Stanley, secretary of administration for the state of Kansas, responded with a corporate solution: He gave key workers and new hires extra cash. Now, although the millennium bug has been vanquished, Stanley is still handing out bonuses to keep state IT salaries "in the ballpark" to ward off private employers that pay 15 percent more.

The Clinton administration is urgently seeking a 15 percent increase in funding for critical infrastructure protection initiatives in its fiscal 2001 budget, but its request is being blocked by election-year politics and partisan paralysis, according to experts.

The White House turned up the heat on Congress last week, criticizing members for an apparent reluctance to fund new information security programs.

Prepare the way for the information technology czar. There is growing support in Congress for one, a presidential advisory committee recommends one, and presidential candidate George W. Bush wants one. Every time a security breach occurs, many politicians and government IT experts line up to call for one.

A terrorist has tapped into an unsecured U.S. modem that provides access to an electric utility's computer systems. The resulting blackout paralyzes multiple regions of the country. Airplanes are stranded in midflight, subway trains are stilled in darkness underground and elevators are stalled between floors.

SYSTEMS FLYING BLIND By Phil Scott Since the middle of the 20th century, when someone first dragged a radar receiver to an airport control tower, pilots have been taking orders from the ground. "Controllers tell pilots where traffic is, and they tell them to speed up, slow down and to turn," says Amy Pritchett, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in Atlanta. "Typically, pilots have been unable to know exactly where and how they fit into the traffic flow."