The House Energy and
Commerce Committee has updated their hearing
web site with additional information about tomorrow’s hearing on Cyber
Threats and Security Solutions. Copies of witness testimony have been posted to
the site.
The
testimony of Dave McCurdy, President and CEO, American Gas
Association, will be of particular interest to the cybersecurity community and
the pipeline security community. He provides an interesting summary of the
various programs that help the pipeline industry identify cybersecurity issues
and techniques for dealing with those issues. Since a great deal of the
industry’s cyber portfolio deals with control systems over hundreds of
thousands of miles of pipelines, McCurdy’s testimony is mainly about control
system security issues.
You would expect that the testimony from a former head of
the CIA, R. James Woolsey, would focus on intelligence issues related to cyber
security. Unfortunately, Woolsey’s
testimony is a one-trick-pony-show about the threat of electromagnetic
pulse (EMP) attacks. I’ll admit that the consequences of an EMP event (natural
or man-made) is a potentially catastrophic cyber-problem on a very large scale,
but this does not seem to be the place to do more than mention the threat in
passing.
Former Directory of National Intelligence (DNI) McConnell
does address intelligence and information sharing issues in his
testimony. He introduces a new and very scary term “suicide cyber attacks”,
fortunately he doesn’t provide a definition of the term that lives up to the
scare value of its source term, suicide bomber. How you get the blind
acceptance of a sure death linked up with the intellectual curiosity necessary
for cyber-attacks is completely ignored.
It looks like the remainder of the nine-member witness panel
will be dealing with IT security issues. I’m not belittling those concerns,
there are very many more IT computers out there, but I will leave coverage of
their testimony for other bloggers.
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