Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 28, 1990 TAG: 9005280065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: EVELYN RICHARDS WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Such a solicitation may not be that far-fetched, considering the latest contract being put up for grabs by the U.S. Army.
Its secretive Center for Signals Warfare in Warrenton, Va., is seeking bids from businesses to study the feasibility of disabling enemy weapons systems by infecting them with disruptive computer programs.
"We're looking to see if we can develop some malicious software concepts. . .[to] use against some adversary's command and control system," said Richard Poisel, the Army center's chief of research and technology. He called the bid solicitation an effort to find businesses that could help in the "research effort," though he admitted it could draw a few run-of-the-mill hackers.
In particular, the Army hopes to explore the use of so-called computer viruses - a type of unwanted software program that can reproduce undetected from one computer to another, hindering the computers' normal functions and sometimes garbling data.
Incidents of computer sabotage have swept the country in recent months as hackers become increasingly efficient at breaking into the systems of businesses, universities and research centers.
But what the Army envisions would be far trickier for your average hacker to pull off. The biggest obstacle would be figuring out how to implant the enemy systems with the dreaded software.
One answer suggested by the Army is to somehow transmit the malicious software code over radio waves. It apparently figures that the trouble-making software could be inadvertently accepted by an adversary's system as it was receiving other information over the air.
But some computer experts say the concept borders on the absurd, in part because such communications systems would likely contain elaborate schemes to protect against intrusions. Also, altering software requires an intimate knowledge of how it operates under normal conditions, something that the United States would be unlikely to have in hand for a rival's system. And most military computer systems cannot be reprogrammed by remote control.
"It's equivalent to walking up to an arcade game and changing the programs of the game. . . with the joysticks," said William Murray, a computer-security consultant who works with Deloitte & Touche in Connecticut.
Not everyone is convinced the idea is so far-fetched.
Myron Cramer, an electronic-warfare specialist at Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc. in Bethesda, Md., sees a day when viruses could be remotely injected into enemy computers that support air-defense and battlefield-control systems, lurking there covertly until they spring into action. He even has described an "assassin" virus that would wreak widespread havoc and then erase itself, leaving no trail behind.
Some experts also believe that evaluating such possibilities could help the United States plug its own vulnerabilities to computer disruptions. Indeed, some computer specialists who were told of the Army's proposal said the United States, more than any other power, is prone to be a victim of malicious software.
"In any kind of environment where you'd want to set something like that loose, our forces would likely be more vulnerable than anyone we would be up against," said Eugene Spafford, a Purdue University professor who specializes in computer security. "We have more computers and ours are more homogeneous than what others would be running."
by CNB