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May 22, 1998:
Hour One:
High-tech Breakdown
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This week, the fragile nature of the high-tech
world that we live in was made painfully obvious as
the Galaxy IV satellite lost contact with the
Earth. This one mis-aimed satellite silenced 80% of
the nation's pager traffic, interrupted telephone
calls, and temporarily shut down transmissions from
several major media organizations - including,
incidentally, National Public Radio.
Satellite users across the country struggled to
recover after the failure - switching transmissions
to other satellites where possible, or to
ground-based data and phone lines. Panamsat, owners
of the Galaxy IV, said that it might take as long
as a week to get things back to normal.
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![Galaxy IV Satellite]()
The Galaxy IV satellite
under construction.
(photo courtesy of Hughes Space and
Communications Corporation)
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Earlier in the week, the Senate held hearings to
find out just how vulnerable another part of our nation's
information infrastructure, the Internet, was to attacks. At
a meeting of the Senate Government Affairs Committee, some
cyber citizens testified that given half an hour and a
computer, they could shut down the Internet for several
days. A report issued by the General Accounting Office
during the Senate meeting found that Federal Aviation
Administration computers were "extremely vulnerable to
criminal and terrorist attacks," and that unclassified
information on State Department computers could easily be
accessed by unauthorized users.
Is America's information infrastructure really all that
vulnerable? What can be done to protect important systems,
like the pagers of medical staff, from going silent when a
fuse blows or someone accidentally pulls the plug on a
critical computer? And can anything protect against more
malicious outages caused by criminals or information
terrorists? Find out on this hour of Science Friday.
Question of the
week:
How
vulnerable do you think our information infrastructure is -
and why?
Give
us some examples....
Guests:
Michael Vatis
Director, National Infrastructure Protection Center
Federal Bureau of
Investigation
Washington, DC
Rob Kling
Professor of
Information
Science
Director, Center
for Social Informatics
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN
"Mudge"
L0pht Heavy
Industries
Cambridge, MA
Tom Longstaff
Manager of Research and Development
CERT Coordination
Center
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA
Articles Discussed:
"Weak Computer Security Practices Jeopardize Flight
Safety" (GAO Report)
Related Links:
National Information
Infrastructure Virtual Library
Digital
Information Infrastructure Guide
National
Telecommunications and Information Administration
Defense Information Systems
Agency
International Computer
Security Association (formerly NCSA)
CERT Coordination Center
L0pht Heavy
Industries
Rootshell.com
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