Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Real-World Hackers Attack During Simulated Attack By Hackers

It’s important that emergency drills are conducted to deal with eventualities that could throw society into chaos, whether they come from terrorists or natural disasters. Doesn’t always mean they will cope with all eventualities, however.

Bizarrely enough, there were terror-and-accident related drills being held on the mornings of September 11, 2001 and July 7, 2005, simulating almost the same kinds of terrorist attacks that occurred on those very same days, at the same times, in the US and England.

From the Associated Press :

    It’s the government’s idea of a really bad day: Washington’s Metro trains shut down. Seaport computers in New York go dark. Bloggers reveal locations of railcars with hazardous materials. Airport control towers are disrupted in Philadelphia and Chicago. Overseas, a mysterious liquid is found on London’s subway.

    And that’s just for starters.

    Those incidents were among dozens of detailed, mock disasters confronting officials rapid-fire in the U.S. government’s biggest-ever “Cyber Storm” war game, according to hundreds of pages of heavily censored files obtained by The Associated Press. The Homeland Security Department ran the exercise to test the nation’s hacker defenses, with help from the State Department, Pentagon, Justice Department, CIA, National Security Agency and others.

    Imagined villains include hackers, bloggers and even reporters. After mock electronic attacks overwhelmed computers at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an unspecified “major news network” airing reports about the attackers refused to reveal its sources to the government. Other simulated reporters were duped into spreading “believable but misleading” information that worsened fallout by confusing the public and financial markets, according to the government’s files.

    The $3 million, invitation-only war game simulated what the U.S. described as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers. The government is organizing another multimillion-dollar war game, Cyber Storm 2, to take place in early March.

    For the participants — including government officials from the United States, England, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and executives from leading technology and transportation companies — the mock disasters came fast and furious: Hacker break-ins at an airline; stolen commercial software blueprints; problems with satellite navigation systems; trouble with police radios in Montana; school closures in Washington, Miami and New York; computer failures at border checkpoints.

    The incidents were divided among categories: computer attacks, physical attacks or psychological operations.

    …key players didn’t understand the role of the premier U.S. organization responsible for fending off major cyber attacks, called the National Cyber Response Coordination Group, and it didn’t have enough technical experts.

    Also, the sheer number of mock attacks complicated defensive efforts.

    The little-known Cyber Response group, headed by the departments of Justice and Homeland Security, represents the largest U.S. government departments — including law enforcement and intelligence agencies — and is the principal organization for responding to cyber attacks and recovering from them.

    …government’s files hint at a tantalizing mystery: In the middle of the war game, someone quietly attacked the very computers used to conduct the exercise. Perplexed organizers traced the incident to overzealous players and sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked “IMPORTANT!” reminding them not to probe or attack the game computers.

Obviously the next drill will have to include the scenario of a hacker attack using a terror drill as a cover for a real-world attack on electronic infrastructure.

Which would then require the follow-up exercise to include the scenario of a real-world hacker attacking the terror drill exercise scenario of a real-world hacker attacking the a terror drill attack by hackers.

Infinite regress.

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