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Modern society's vulnerability exposed

Wednesday, December 29, 1999

By ROBERT S. BOYD(BR)Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The world's Y2K jitters are aroused in part by the dawning recognition of a far more serious problem: No matter what happens, or doesn't, this weekend, our high-tech civilization is becoming increasingly vulnerable to significant disruptions, or even collapse. The bewildering intricacy and interconnectedness of computer networks, energy supplies, financial systems, telecommunications, transportation, law enforcement, manufacturing and even retailing makes all of them vulnerable to accidents, errors and attacks. Even a relatively minor failure in one of the "critical infrastructures" upon which our lives, health and property depend can radiate calamity across the nation and even around the globe. Sometimes a tiny mistake has horrendous consequences. In 1997, a programmer loaded the wrong computer tape and brought two of the nation's largest railroads almost to a halt. The blunder came during the merger of the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific lines. It caused a monster traffic jam at a railyard in Houston that eventually spread through much of the 36,000-mile system and ended up costing more than $1 billion in losses. Similarly, a missing semicolon in a computer program shut down most of AT&T's telephone network for nine hours in January 1990. First one central switch crashed, then another and another, like falling dominoes, until 50 million long- distance calls were blocked. "AT&T people were not prepared," said Robert Lucky, vice president of Telcordia Technologies, a telecommunications research firm in Red Bank, N.J. "It never crossed people's minds that the whole network would go down." Alerted by such incidents, a surge of international terrorist threats and the Y2K problem, governments from the White House to city hall are grappling with the need to protect these highly computerized systems. The private sector, too, is increasingly concerned. "The most critical sectors of our economy are potentially vulnerable to disruptions from computer attack," President Clinton warned last January. He asked Congress for $1.5 billion to address the problem. The president also issued an executive order calling for a national plan that links government and industry to detect weak points in essential systems and to defend them. A Critical Infrastructures Assurance Office was set up in the White House to manage the program. Meanwhile, the FBI established a National Infrastructure Protection Center to coordinate investigations and responses to attack. A "Cyber Corps" of experts is being recruited to handle threats to computer networks that connect systems. "When these systems perform badly or do not work at all, they put life, liberty and property at risk, disrupt the work of governments and corporations, embarrass people or hurt organizations," declared a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences titled "Trust in Cyberspace."

-- Homer Beanfang (Bats@inbellfry.com), December 29, 1999

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Thanks Homer...This article tells me that I need to prepare for y2k AFTER y2k!

-- citizen (lost@sea.com), December 29, 1999.