Russia, China, Yugoslavia developing cyberterrorism tactics against U.S.

WASHINGTON -- Several rivals and enemies of the United States have developed the technology required to launch a cyberattack on computer systems throughout the country.

U.S. officials said that since 1998 the unspecified nations have developed doctrine and techniques required to attack U.S. computer systems that drive the nation's military, air traffic control and infrastructure systems.

"We are aware, now, over the course of the last two years, that several other nations have developed offensive information warfare units, organizations, tactics, doctrine and capability," said Dick Clarke, a counterterrorism coordinator at the National Security Council. "Now, that doesn't mean they're going to use them. But it means that they're developing them, they're getting better all the time."

Clarke would not name the countries. But experts said the nations probably include Russia, China and Yugoslavia.

U.S. officials said in a war with the United States enemies would seek to shut down U.S. power grids, telecommunications and transportation networks. Other targets would be the U.S. banking system. The officials said the same techniques used to hack into web sites can be employed in a cyberattack.

"Cyberattack is deemed useful by those countries that perhaps don't have the conventional military capability the United States does," U.S. Air Force Space Command chief Gen. Richard Myers said. "And so it's a way of, asymmetrically perhaps, attacking adversaries, not just the United States but potentially other adversaries.

Commerce Secretary William Daley said this is the first time the United States cannot protect its infrastructure. "We can't hire an army or a police force that's large enough to protect all of America's cell phones or pagers or computer networks -- not when 95 percent of these infrastructures are owned and operated by the private sector," he said.

On Friday, the Clinton administration, which spent billions of dollars protecting the nation's computers against the Y2K bug, launched a drive against cyberterrorists. The U.S. plan comes after three years of efforts by 22 federal agencies and is meant to protect the nation's information infrastructure against hackers and terrorists. This includes military computers and those that drive vital services and air traffic control.

President Bill Clinton said he has requested from Congress $91 million for the first stage of the project. In all, he said, the project will cost $2 billion in fiscal 2001.

"This plan is not the end of the discussion, but the beginning of a dialogue with Congress, with the American people and especially with the private sector," Clinton said.

The plan would create an institute that will fill research gaps related to computer security. The Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection will include whom Clinton termed the "finest computer scientists and engineers from the private sector, from universities and from other research facilities to find ways to close these gaps."

The institute would focus on encryption methodologies to protect critical data, as well as the design of systems to detect intruder monitoring. It would also design curriculum for the study of computer security.