Today, the International Spy Museum hosted a very intellectually stimulating panel discussion on the current state of cyber threats and cybersecurity.

Melissa Hathaway led the evening off with a very thorough debrief on her team’s dissection of the current state of cyber threats and the US government.  This report was commission by President Obama, and published last summer entitled the Cyberspace Policy Review: Assuring a Trusted and Resilient Information and Communications Infrastructure.  She stated that the United States has never been more vulnerable to a “weapon of mass disruption” than now.  There are many near-term and immediate actions that need to be addressed in order to keep us from experiencing a very damaging “mass disruption” event.  These events could be nation-wide power failure, mass transit shutdown, communications failures, etc.

Later, James Lewis discussed how our country needs to re-think how we view two things: cybersecurity and civil liberties.  We know we are facing a huge problem, but the US is at a considerable disadvantage in fighting this threat because of our concern over fundamental privacy concerns.  Instead of accepting that line of thinking, Lewis argues that maybe we should open this issue up for debate, and be willing to accept a certain amount of trusted inspection.

Lastly, Michael Assante discussed how vulnerable we really are from a electrical grid and utility standpoint.  One thing that rang through loud and clear across each of these presenters was that we are on the precipice of disaster. Confidence was a huge theme in Assante’s talk.  If you can’t trust your network, your data, your system, then our will to fight and continue to use information systems is lost.  This is the ultimate aim in cyber-warfare; as it is in any terrorist activity - fear.

And how does IPv6 and the Internet have an impact?

An audience member asked a very poignant question after the panel had finished about how will IPv6 be mitigated in planning for the future cyber security actions?  You could actually hear the crickets.. and we were inside…  There was no answer other than to say, “we recognize we are behind.  This and many other technologies…”  Obviously, this answer left many even more uncomfortable, to say the least.

What  exactly is the threat if left un-mitigated you ask?

In its very nature, the IETF wanted to make the transition to IPv6 as easy and painless as possible.  So having many different forms like dual-stack, tunnels, translation, etc was beneficial to many concerned engineers.  But seeing as these are the same people that developed the Internet, openness is always much more important to them than security.  So what are the big ones?

• Accidental IPv6: meaning unknowing to me I just stumbled upon acquiring IPv6 connectivity because I have Linux, Mac or Windows Vista/7.   Therefore, leaving me completely vulnerable to a botnet gaining access to my PC and turning it in to the next DDoS tool.  (See Teredo, 6in4, TSP, TIC, etc)
• Intentional IPv6: meaning I am a bad guy and I want to skirt security so I tunnel through my network and gain access to systems that my firewall, IPS/IDS and proxy would have stopped had they been capable of this level of filtering.

The takeaway to this discussion is key: How we react now will define our future.  Will it take another 9-11 for us to wake up to this reality?

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 29th, 2009 at 12:12 am and is filed under Jeremy Duncan, Cybersecurity, Blog: Information Assurance, Blog: IPv6. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.