AT&T security guru talks DoS attacks, hackers

If this new generation of computer scientists is smarter, what kind of impact will they have when they enter the workforce?

I'm in my 40s. When I was growing up technology wasn't generally available. Young people today are growing up with technology and they speak it fluently the way you speak French in Paris.

My kids, I buy them these complex gaming systems. My son, he'll go online and buy these hacking devices, and expanded memory and a way of bridging Wi-Fi to our video, and to his camera. There's no manual, there's no anything, he's just sort of natively doing it, and it just works.

When he gets into the workforce, I don't know if he's going to be an engineer, a lawyer, a doctor or whatever. But whatever he's doing he brings that capability to bear. If he goes bad and decides he wants to be a hacker then we've got a problem because that's a kid who knows what he's doing.

Back in 1999, you helped lead security for the White House's Y2K Information Coordination Center. What was that like?

That was cool. I got a jacket.

Actually, it's interesting. In October of 1999 a group of us got called up to Carnegie Mellon University to get a briefing on something called a DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] attack tool. They showed us how you could drop DDoS zombies into a bunch of PCs and then the zombies can attack a site. We looked at it and I freaked out and I said the Y2K center would be an awesome target for a DDoS attack.

So what happened?

Nothing happened that night obviously. Everybody breathed a sigh of relief. But March of 2000 is when eBay and CNN and a bunch others got hit with that DDoS attack.

We went whoa - this is not fake, it's real, it really can happen. Nobody did it to us, I don't know why, they could have.

How did you prepare?

I had no idea what to do. We were watching. If they were overwhelming a server we were ready to turn the server off and on, ready to pull the plug on the connection and pop it back in. That kind of stuff, just like in your home if your PC's going nuts. That's all we could think of.