From: Haaretz
Experts speaking at international counter-terrorism conference stress the Internet’s vulnerability to attack.
By Judy Maltz
The Western world needs to brace itself for a cyber-attack of unprecedented proportions, a senior British law enforcement official warned participants at an international counter-terrorism conference on Tuesday.
“We have not had the 9/11 yet in cyber, but it will come,” said Adrian Leppard, commissioner of the City of London police. “You cannot think that an infrastructure that is unregulated, that cannot be policed, and that has no common legislation or rules is going to be able to protect itself indefinitely from that sort of attack.”
Leppard was a participant on a special panel devoted to the challenges of cyber-terrorism at the 13th annual conference of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya.
The City of London police chief said that it is incumbent upon government leaders to engage large private corporations, which are losing billions of dollars today to cyber attacks, in the battle against such warfare. “The biggest global sectors, banking and telecom, are those with the most to lose and they’re the people you need to work with,” he said. “We have to start thinking of finding profitable ways of encouraging them to help start working to protect themselves and us.”
Other international participants on the panel warned that existing legislation designed to combat cyber crime was inadequate. “I’m not here to criticize any government, but it is extremely important that we think about the need to be effective and give our law enforcement people effective powers,” said Mauro Miedco, a senior official at the terrorism prevention branch of the United National Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna.
He noted that about 90 percent of recent terror attacks have been prepared, planned and incited through the Internet. “The Internet today is the most powerful tool that terrorist organizations have at their disposal,” he said.
Governments need to reach out more to Internet providers and enlist their assistance in combating cyber warfare, urged Jarko Jokinen, an advisor on anti-terrorism issues at the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. “Law enforcement officials are responsible for the prevention and investigation of crime,” he said, “but the Internet industries are also knowledgeable and they have lots of data about customers who are perpetrators and victims of criminal acts. We need to engage them in this way.”
Nimrod Koslovski, an Israeli expert on information security, said the most effective way of fighting cyber-terrorism was not through enhanced legislation and enforcement activities but through the development of behavior-predicting technologies capable of pre-empting such attacks. “Criminals and terrorists don’t read our laws. They couldn’t care less about them,” said Koslovski, a partner in JVP Cyber Labs. Referring to recent revelations emerging from the Edward Snowden affair, he said that even the U.S. government doesn’t have a clean record in this regard. “Snowden dropped a bomb and told us that the U.S. couldn’t care less about legal documents and international covenants,” he said. “When the U.S. was facing a risk of terror activities, they were going for technology and looking for intelligence and information they need in real time. “ “We need to shift to a proactive paradigm – if you can predict a crime before someone commits it based on technology that can predict and prevent it before it happens, that is better for society. That’s how we were able to deal with with online credit card fraud, with spam, and with most online viruses,” continued Koslovski.
Citing the examples of electronic jihad groups in Iran and Syria, Dr. Eitan Azani, deputy director of the ICT, said that state-sponsored organizations had the best operational capabilities today of all those active in cyber-terrorism and therefore posed the biggest challenge to the West.
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