Like the disappearing frogs that some say signal an environmental danger, the silent pagers across America on Wednesday offered a kind of warning–an omen of how vulnerable a technology-based society can be when the technology stops working.
The failure of a computer processor on the Galaxy IV satellite knocked out as much as 90 percent of the nation’s pager traffic, as well as television and radio feeds, and underscored warnings that the nation’s vital telecommunications network is susceptible to accidents, hackers and even terrorists.
Experts say government and private industry have failed to take adequate precautions against these risks, while the public has largely been lulled into a false sense of security by the fact that technology, more often than not, works.
The pager snafu is just the latest in a series of incidents highlighting the weaknesses in what is called the nation’s information infrastructure. On Tuesday, for instance, an Argentinian hacker who broke into Pentagon computers containing sensitive government research on satellites, radiation and energy, pleaded guilty in U.S. District court to theft charges.
Last month, a computer glitch paralyzed one of AT&T’s high-speed data networks, shutting down pager service while wreaking havoc with credit-card authorizations and Internet traffic.
In February, aviation officials discreetly alerted airports in the U.S. and Britain of a breach in their computerized security systems. A flaw could allow terrorists to dial in by computer and create security badges giving unauthorized people access to off-limits areas. They also could unlock doors protecting sensitive areas.
“The whole infrastructure stinks” in terms of its reliability and security, said Peter Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International’s Computer Science Laboratory in Menlo Park, Calif, referring to the many weak spots in the nation’s technological network.
He said he was hopeful the breakdown might bring more attention to the larger problem, which he testified about before a Senate committee on Tuesday hours before the satellite malfunctioned.
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“The pager problem is again indicative of the fact that we get totally over-dependent on our technology. We don’t think about what happens if something goes wrong. There are a lot of folks who are in serious trouble if their pagers don’t work this morning because that’s their means of existence.”
The satellite failure, Neumann said, demonstrates the folly of relying too heavily on any part of the information infrastructure. “The fact that 90 percent of the interstate paging systems are using that satellite is a problem. One satellite goes out and all of a sudden a massive part of the infrastructure fails. Diversity is the answer. You don’t put all of your eggs in one basket.”
The Galaxy IV satellite was an illustration of the vast amount of data traffic that passes through a given point of the network, making malfunctions all the more crippling. In addition to the pager traffic, the satellite relayed the WB network’s programming, the moving weather maps used by virtually all television weather forecasters, live feeds of the Powerball lottery drawing for 88 stations, and authorizations for credit-card purchases.
“This should be a wake-up call to businesses of all sizes that you have to look to backups and fallbacks because once in a while, these things will fail,” said Michael French, research vice president at Insight Research Corp. in Parsipanny, N.J.
“The big financial companies are aware of this and do have backup systems in place because communications (are) critical to them. But many small businesses don’t have backups because they cost money and failures are rare, so they just look upon them as part of doing business.
“But these days with around 60 million people having pagers, there is a very large audience paying attention to failures like this.”
Like satellites, the Internet has become a major part of the nation’s data pipeline. But according to experts, it is much more susceptible to intentional disruption than satellites, which respond only to encoded commands transmitted by their operators.
At Tuesday’s hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, a hacker who publicly uses the name Mudge said any of the seven hackers who appeared with him at the hearing could cripple the Internet by sending messages that would make it impossible for various parts of the computer network to communicate with each other.
An electromagnetic pulse aimed at one of the unshielded commercial buildings that house the computers that serve as “on ramps” to the Internet could also short-circuit much of the network, another hacker said. “It would definitely take a few days for people to figure out what was going on,” Mudge said.
In many instances, personal privacy also is at risk because of shortcomings in the technologies being used for the Internet. With Internet data sent over cable systems, most customers of these services are not aware of the potential for another user to watch their communications across the cable network, the hackers said.
“If you’re looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be,” said Mudge.