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Science
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> 1998
> May
> May 22, 1998:
Hour One: High-tech Breakdown
| 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. | 
The Galaxy IV satellite
under construction.
(photo courtesy of Hughes Space and Communications Corporation) | 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
We asked our listeners about the vulnerability of our information infrastructure.
Here's what a few of them had to say.
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
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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