UC evaluates defenses against cyberterrorism

By Ellen Kang
Daily Bruin Contributor

In light of Sept. 11, employees across the University of
California are continually evaluating policies and procedures to
defend against the possible act of cyberterrorism.

“Anybody as simple as a hacker can send a virus to damage
files … to corrupt or steal files that universities may use for
research, academic or administrative information,” said
William Campbell, associate vice president of information resources
and communications for the UC Office of the President.

Cyberterrorism is an act by a person who unlawfully uses
computing resources to violate private information and disrupts the
computer system, Williams said.

Cyberterrorism and other cyber-attacks, such as computer viruses
and hacking, typically share the same underlying technologies and
techniques but differ in the degree of damage, focus or target and
the intent of the attack.

“One would associate cyberterrorism as a more damaging and
focused form of cybersecurity attacks, such as destroying data,
breaking into telephone networks and building control,” said
John DeGolyer, information technology security analyst.

Each UC campus has measures to protect their computer system
against cyberterrorism. UCLA has policies, procedures and
technologies to defend against cybersecurity attacks by providing
firewalls, anti-virus detection and back-up files.

In addition, defenses such as Information Security Technologies,
an incident response group, and UCLA’s technical staff
monitor various computer systems.

“UCLA has a very diverse, distributed computer
environment. It would be difficult for any single attack to affect
the entire campus,” said Kent Wada, information technology
security and policy coordinator.

Campus departments are working on new steps in cybersecurity.
Developing disaster recovery plans ““ similar to work done in
preparing for Y2K ““ and off-site back up, which is an easy
way to switch to a system in another geographic area, are two steps
being evaluated.

It is important to recognize that deploying more aggressive
forms of protection takes a significant amount of staff time to
monitor, the IT department said. Also, students and faculty can
obtain anti-virus software for their computers.

While the university is heightening security, cyberterrorism is
difficult to fully eliminate.

“Handling something like cyberterrorism would be difficult
because while we are installing new anti-viruses, the hackers are
out there finding ways to get into it and causing us to find newer
ways of controlling this, said Gerald Popek, adjunct computer
science professor.