NSA officials now suspect human error and a computer glitch may have caused that meltdown. But it wasn’t farfetched to believe hackers were to blame. In recent years, cyberattacks on sensitive government computer systems have become a serious problem. CIA Director George Tenet told NEWSWEEK that foiling hackers is a top law-enforcement priority, with the Pentagon, FBI, CIA and NSA all scrambling to find ways to stay one step ahead of a sophisticated, and often unseen, enemy.
Federal officials are especially concerned about attacks on the country’s increasingly computer-controlled infrastructure. A 1996 presidential commission found that the nation’s power grids, airports, rail systems, hospitals and even space program are all vulnerable to attack. These systems, which are considered less protected than military or law-enforcement computers, are attractive targets for thrill-seeking hackers trying to see how much havoc they can cause from their laptops. In 1997 a hacker temporarily severed one of NASA’s uplinks to the Atlantis shuttle. Several times in the ’90s emergency 911 service in Eastern states was knocked out when hackers flooded the phone lines with automatic-dialing software.
The sheer volume of attacks is alarming. The Pentagon alone estimates its computer networks are hacked about 250,000 times a year. Most of the intruders are relatively harmless thrill seekers. But at least 500 are considered serious attempts at breaking into classified systems. In 1998 three teenage hackers broke into heavily protected Air Force and Navy computers, leaving “trapdoors” that allowed them to return undetected.
In recent years officials have also secretly observed attempts by foreign countries to penetrate U.S. government computers. According to one study, at least 13 countries have “information warfare” programs directed against the United States. “It’s the Chinese, the French, Israelis, attacking American targets and doing it quite successfully,” says one NSA official. Last year Russian hackers successfully penetrated gaps in Pentagon computer security, and made off with at least some classified material. The Russians may still have access to top-secret computers. According to one intelligence report reviewed by NEWSWEEK, the methods the hackers used are “impossible… to detect.”
U.S. officials acknowledge that they catch about 10 percent of those who probe or penetrate government computers. But they’re working to increase the numbers by beefing up surveillance, installing intruder-detection programs and limiting the number of people with computer access to sensitive information. They’ve also begun to use their own hackers to find weaknesses. In 1997 a team of NSA hackers managed to shut down the Pentagon’s top-secret National Military Command Center. They left just one fax machine working–enough to send the brass a note to let them know they’d been hacked.
