Ger­ard Best

Re­cent at­tacks on Caribbean com­put­er net­works by In­ter­net hack­ers should be a ma­jor con­cern for Caribbean busi­ness­es and gov­ern­ments.

"Com­put­er hack­ing is a glob­al prob­lem," tech­nol­o­gy ex­pert Bevil Wood­ing said at the fifth re­gion­al meet­ing of the Caribbean Net­work Op­er­a­tors Group (CaribNOG) in Bridgetown, Bar­ba­dos.

"As the re­gion in­creas­es in its de­pen­dence on in­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies, it must at the same time build greater ca­pac­i­ty to man­age and pro­tect its tech­nol­o­gy as­sets."

Wood­ing gave sev­er­al ex­am­ples from around the world of vol­un­teer groups of eth­i­cal hack­ers who had mo­bilised to pro­tect their lo­cal and re­gion­al net­works.

"Since the Caribbean is no less vul­ner­a­ble to cy­ber­at­tacks, we must make sim­i­lar in­vest­ments in the de­vel­op­ment of our hu­man re­sources. The re­gion needs a trust­wor­thy tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ty, ca­pa­ble of de­fend­ing Caribbean net­works. CaribNOG is key part of the re­sponse to that chal­lenge," he said.

The Bar­ba­dos meet­ing, CaribNOG's largest to date, drew 100 tech prac­ti­tion­ers from around the re­gion and as far away as Africa, Eu­rope and New Zealand. In his ad­dress, Wood­ing, one of the co-founders of CaribNOG, de­scribed the meet­ings as "in­valu­able for ad­vanc­ing the skills of the re­gion's ICT pro­fes­sion­als who de­sign, pro­cure, op­er­ate, man­age and se­cure the net­work in­fra­struc­ture."

The CaribNOG 5 pro­gram in­clud­ed a mix of hands-on tech­ni­cal train­ing ses­sions de­liv­ered by re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al fa­cil­i­ta­tors. Top­ics cov­ered over the three-day event in­clud­ed cy­ber­se­cu­ri­ty, In­ter­net Ex­change Point man­age­ment, IPv6 de­ploy­ment and DNSSEC im­ple­men­ta­tion tech­niques.

"We need more peo­ple in the Caribbean with an ad­vanced un­der­stand­ing net­work en­gi­neer­ing. Dili­gent enough to stay cur­rent. But al­so bold enough to ex­per­i­ment and in­no­vate to solve lo­cal as well as glob­al needs."

One ma­jor is­sue dis­cussed at the event was the changeover from IPv4 to IPv6.

IPv4 pro­to­col was de­vel­oped as a man­age­ment tool pro­vid­ing ad­dress­es for all de­vices that use the In­ter­net in the 1970s and pub­lished in 1981. How­ev­er, the num­ber of de­vices now con­nect­ed to the In­ter­net may be equal to or ex­ceed the glob­al pop­u­la­tion. This ex­plo­sion of IP en­abled de­vices on the mar­ket has ex­haust­ed ad­dress­es un­der the IPv4 pro­to­col.

Its re­place­ment, IPv6, is the next-gen­er­a­tion pro­to­col, pro­vid­ing ap­prox­i­mate­ly 340 un­decil­lion ad­dress­es (340 tril­lion tril­lion tril­lion) IP ad­dress­es. This is cal­cu­lat­ed to be suf­fi­cient to en­sure the avail­abil­i­ty of IP ad­dress­es to meet the needs of the rapid­ly grow­ing In­ter­net, far in­to the fu­ture.

Wood­ing, an In­ter­net Strate­gist with US-based re­search firm Pack­et Clear­ing House (PCH), al­so touched on the sta­tus of In­ter­net Ex­change Point (IXP) pro­lif­er­a­tion in the re­gion. An IXP's pri­ma­ry pur­pose is to al­low net­works to in­ter­con­nect di­rect­ly, re­sult­ing in sav­ings in cost of de­liv­er­ing lo­cal In­ter­net traf­fic, re­duced la­ten­cy and in­creased net­work re­silience.

He charged par­tic­i­pants to "em­brace the op­por­tu­ni­ty to co­op­er­ate for the greater good".

The three-day event was joint­ly host­ed by the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union (CTU), the Amer­i­can Reg­istry for In­ter­net Num­bers (ARIN) and Pack­et Clear­ing House (PCH), with the sup­port of the Gov­ern­ment of Bar­ba­dos, The In­ter­net So­ci­ety (ISOC), the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean In­ter­net Ad­dress­es Reg­istry (LAC­NIC) and Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions.