Experts: Worry more about insiders than cyberterrorism

WASHINGTON - Enterprises worried about cybersecurity should pay more attention to their own employees than to the as-of-yet unrealized threat of cyberterrorism, two cybersecurity experts warned a group of IT professionals Tuesday.

Speaking at the Gartner IT Security Summit 2003, representatives of Gartner and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) suggested that enterprises should worry more about their intellectual property leaking out through employees or small-time hackers than their entire networks crashing from attacks of organized cyberterrorists.

The threat of cyberterrorism to enterprises may be overstated, but the threat of less organized attacks may be understated in current discussions about cybersecurity, said CSIS director James Lewis.

While a host of security experts have called on the U.S. and its allies to be vigilant against cyberterrorism, think tank director Lewis said he's seen no evidence of large cyberterrorist attacks yet.

The U.S. has counted more than 1,800 physical terrorism attacks since 1995, Lewis noted, but no major cyberterrorism in that time frame. "Kinetic weapons are much more effective right now," Lewis added.

However, enterprises should be worried about attacks, whether they are from inside employees or outsiders, because they have more property than individuals do, and fewer ways to protect themselves than nations do. Enterprises are where the money is in cyber attacks, whether it be intellectual property, extortion or financial data, Lewis said, with loss of intellectual property and sensitive data the fastest growing cybersecurity loss.

"You get a lot of attention on cyberterrorism and Osama bin Laden sitting in front of a keyboard, but you ought to be more worried about insiders," Lewis said to close to 1,000 attendees of the Gartner conference. "The primary target is companies, and we probably put not enough effort into thinking about how to protect them."

Individual hackers will increasingly become another threat to both security and privacy because of their access to ever more powerful technology, added Richard Hunter, a vice president at Gartner and co-chairman of the conference. By 2008, Gartner estimates home computers will have 40-GHz processors and 1.3 terabytes of storage, he said, leading to both beneficial and dangerous uses of home computers.

"That's enough to do data mining at home," Hunter said. "When we think about an environment that involves governments collecting information, that involves enterprises gathering information, we now have to think about an environment in which individuals are going to have significant power to gather and analyze and use information."

An enterprise's greatest strength and greatest weakness are often its employees, whether they make mistakes in not following security best practices or they have malicious intent, added Casey Dunlevy, project lead at the CERT Analysis Center at Carnegie Mellon University. Because of that, it's difficult for companies to come up with accurate threat models that can show them where to put their resources.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.