Report to the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection

Abstract

: This report was submitted to the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection for their consideration. Based on the experience of the CERT SM Coordination Center, we identify threats to and vulnerabilities of the Internet and estimate the cascade effect that a successful, sustained attack on the Internet would have on the critical national infrastructures set out in Executive Order 13010. Finally, we discuss the implications for public policy and make specific recommendations. 1. Introduction At this writing, government, commercial, and educational organizations depend on computers to such an extent that day-to-day operations are significantly hindered when the computers are "down." Currently many of the day-to-day operations depend upon connections to the Internet, and new connections are continuously being made to the Internet. In July 1996, an estimated 12,900,000 computers worldwide were connected to the Internet, compared with 130,000 in 1989 and 1,000,000 in ..