The US-Soviet Cyber Cold War

Roberto123 writes "A security expert with the NSA says a cyber cold war is being waged that has significant parallels to the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union. Dickie George says the way to fight the cyber cold war is by building security into technology, making it transparent to the end user, continually monitoring networks and updating their security software."

It's even more boring.

[khasim]

From TFA:

"This is life and death and about our freedom and our way of life," he's not talking about the Soviet Union firing nuclear missiles at the U.S. or infiltrating our government with spies bent on subversion. He's talking about cyber criminals hacking into personal, business or government computers, stealing information, intellectual property and/or money.

Oh noes!!! The Nigerian scammers are taking our Freedom! Teenagers downloading our movies are stealing our way of life!!!

How about we focus on the real issues? Why don't the banks have a better means of verifying transactions?

I'm still more worried about nuclear missiles than I am about whether the newest Harry Potter movie is available on a torrent.

But that's just me.

Who's fighting for freedom?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the cold war, Americans were afraid of losing their freedom to the Soviet Union. But according to the article, the cyber cold war is about America holding on to its "intellectual property":

In the cyber cold war, the capabilities and resources of our adversaries refers to the ability ... to steal intellectual property from businesses, secrets from governments and money from everybody.

Some of us still remember the cold war...

[Anonymous Coward]

Some ("Many" might be more appropriate here) of us still remember the cold war and lived in the small countries that bordered the soviet union. I lived in a country that bordered the soviet union and the risk of invasion was very real (the communist party also planned a revolution, even though they failed to carry that out) even without a large scale nuclear war. But the risk of the war - That only a few people would need to be too trigger happy and tomorrow the world as we know it might not exist - was always in the back of our minds. (Not saying that it was constant terror: Some of the best years of my life were during the cold war. But even if we were able to put the fear in the background, it was always there. Every news broadcast about the latest political tension between us and our large neighbour was a reminder of it.)

Speaking of "cyber war" is in itself a bit silly (cyber bombs destroying your house? cyber soldiers raping civilians? people dying on cyber prison camps? people starving and resorting to cannibalism under cyber siege? Cyber war has nothing to do with anything that we assosciate with war) but it might have some justification as we become more and more dependant on our IT infrastructure. However, it's rediculous to compare it to the cold war: If it would be like cold war (=we would have to live constantly aware of the fact that it is very possible that the world as we know it ceases to exist due to a few trigger happy officers) we wouldn't really need articles to tell us about it.

Re:Some of us still remember the cold war...

[FatLittleMonkey]

"Unprovoked." Cute.