FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Utah Is Hit With Up to 500 Million Cyberattacks Daily—Blame the NSA?

Since the opening of a new NSA datacenter, the Utah state government has seen a 10,000 fold increase in cyberattacks.

For those not into canyoneering or skiing, Utah quickly turns into a very dull place: churches, dry counties, strip malls, sprawl, repeat. The Utah state government, however, has lately been on the receiving end of ​up to 500 million cyberattacks daily, an unwilling participant in what appears to be a one-sided cyberwar against the "beehive state." The source of all of these attacks, officials argue, are misguided hackers thinking that state computers will offer some backdoor into the Salt Lake Valley's recently-opened NSA datacenter (which they don't).

Advertisement

The evidence is sort of compelling: the rate of cyberattacks against state government systems has increased 10,000 times over since the facility opened in 2013. And said opening was indeed widely publicized and protested and that's hardly quieted in the years since; just last month a Utah state representative ​introduced legislation that would deny the NSA center water and power—currently obtained from the surrounding city of Bluffdale—joining a handful of similar anti-NSA efforts in other US states.

"I really do believe it was all the attention drawn to the NSA facility. In the cyberworld, that's a big deal," Keith Squires, the Utah State Public Safety Commissioner, told a legislative committee last week, ​according to the Salt Lake Tribune. "I watched as those increases jumped so much over the last few years. And talking to counterparts in other states, they weren't seeing that amount of increase like we were."

"Maybe these hackers are thinking: 'If we can attack state systems, we can get info that NSA isn't releasing,'" Richard Forno, director of the University of Maryland's graduate cybersecurity program, ​told the Associated Press. Still, that's a whole lot of attacks to chalk up to goofballs not really understanding the basic divisions of government.

In any case, the attacks are typical and typically varied: port sniffing, password fishing, direct attacks, etc. The data comes courtesy of a relatively new (2012) system implemented by Utah to detect, block,and track hacking attempts made against state computers, so there's really only a single year of pre-NSA baseline data to compare to. None of this is particularly scientific, in other words.

And yet: that's about 150 attacks per day for every single Utah resident. Tim Junio, a cybersecurity researcher at Stanford, isn't all that awed. The "attacks" can probably be mostly attributed to, "noise from low-tech people rather than concerted efforts for meaningful foreign intelligence collection," he told the AP. Which is a lot of noise.