The Department of Homeland Security's second iteration of Cyber Storm is responsible for a massive cyber attack simulation. Through it, and with the help of a congressionally mandated exercise, white hat hackers tested whether the government and business officials can handle cyberthreats to critical networked services.
None of the actual networks were damaged after computer security types have been obliged to repulse numerous probable crippling cyberattacks.
18 federal government agencies, four foreign countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom), nine states, and more than 40 companies (among them: McAfee, Microsoft, Cisco, Dow Chemical Company, Juniper Networks, and Wachovia) took part at this fake attack.
Although is the second activity of its kind and is expected its scale would grow over time, Homeland Security says is the biggest simulation up to now, having an important uptick in the number of "incidents" lobbed at participants.
The DHS officials declared that the participants had to contend with nearly 2,000 "injects": hacker intrusions, amped-up denial-of-service attacks or deliberately misleading intelligence information.
In February 2006, Cyber Storm 1 was labeled the "most complex multinational, cross-sector cyber exercise to date" after involving seven federal agencies, more than 30 companies and five countries, covering 60 different physical locations.
Yet, few issues still remained unsolved: the number of "technical experts" wasn’t enough for decoding the huge amount of flowing information, whose services should be requested in case of a crisis and the need, in case of cyber incidents, of a "triage" plan.
If it took two years to obtain some poor information regarding Cyber Storm I, than the result of the Cyber Storm II exercise will remain hidden for us until, maybe like the first time, the Associated Press will have access to them.
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