Behind Cyberwar FUD 98
Nicola Hahn writes "The inevitable occurred this week as The Economist broached the topic of cyberwar with a couple of articles in its July 3rd issue. The first article concludes that 'countries should agree on more modest accords, or even just informal "rules of the road" that would raise the political cost of cyber-attacks.' It also makes vague references to 'greater co-operation between governments and the private sector.' When attribution is a lost cause (and it is), international treaties are meaningless because there's no way to determine if a participant has broken them. The second recommendation is even more alarming because it's using a loaded phrase that, in the past couple of years, has been wielded by those who advocate Orwellian solutions. The other article is a morass of conflicting messages. It presumes to focus on cyberwar, yet the bulk of the material deals with cybercrime and run-of-the-mill espionage. Then there's also the standard ploy of hypothetical scenarios: depicting how we might be attacked and what the potential outcome of these attacks could be. The author concludes with the ominous warning that terrorists 'prefer the gory theatre of suicide-bombings to the anonymity of computer sabotage — for now.' What's truly disturbing is that The Economist never goes beyond a superficial analysis of the topic to examine what's driving all of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (PDF), a subject dealt with in this Lockdown 2010 white paper."
Yup (Score:1, Interesting)
Still posting at -1
So you are taking Economist seriously. (Score:1, Insightful)
EVERY media outlet. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Economist is a bit conservative on the side business, but as far as being their lackey - I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes they come out with things that can be interpreted as almost anti-business. They've also been doing some rather critical pieces on BP lately as an example.
Or is BP behind on their payments to the Economist?
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Bandwagons.... everyone has one.
Except for the Church of Scientology.
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They use those DC-10 looking spaceships right?
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Bandwagons.... everyone has one.
As easy as it is to jump on one, it is easy to jump off, too.
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Even a biased publication has to look out for its reputation, propaganda is worthless if people just ignore it and slamming a company that's already in bad reputation is an easy reputation boost.
Then again with the sales numbers of tabloids I'm not sure people ignore disreputable sources...
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Fox has mostly talk shows. And if you listened close enough you'd hear that portion when the commenter on each show speaks. I personally stopped watching Fox a long time ago for that very reason. They have more talk shows than they do news at this point. Do not confuse a talk show with news. Even then the news they report on is biased just as much as CNN, NBC, and CBS report on news, but don't bash one without at least admitting the bias of the others. Without comparing the two, you become what you're
Fox news and the right to lie. (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre [wikipedia.org]
What other "news" organization would go to court to defend their right to lie in a "news" story?
If you tell the viewers what the viewers want to hear (regardless of any factual basis) then you will attract a lot of viewers.
Youre not sure about that ? (Score:2)
precisely the articles/views that any given american conglomerate dominant in any given field is publicized in economist exactly at the convenient times. no earlier, no less. american media industry stages an attack against net neutrality ? you will find economist either preceding it with an article or following immediately after it starts. copenhagen talks are coming up in regard to climate ? same. moreover, the views and defenses it reflects also continues
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If it gets busted, it can be "liquidated" (cut up). The bad pieces - the debt - can then be bundled separately and shiped off to international central-banks' debts, to be paid off by the people.
Meanwhile, the "good" parts are re-bundled, bought up (with emergency, government-backed loans) and integrated into som lesser company (or agglomeration tereof). Which then becomes "BP" again, with another name, swallowed up from the inside. The same names, however, will crop up in the new boardrooms, and as investor
The Economist used to be good (Score:2)
It's still better than most publications, but ten years ago it was great.
I have noticed a decline in the quality of their reporting, and a greater willingness to toe the government line.
I recently let my subscription lapse.
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Someone is pushing something, best just to read all you can and see who had the better overview as history rolls out.
Some always stand out as having got it more correct than just trying to hide or shape.
Re:So you are taking Economist seriously. (Score:4, Interesting)
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Mr Hedwards, I have an excellent education thank you. Please allow me to further yours. The GP was calling out a private institution for advocating business interests, as if this was somehow a terrible thing. Oh, and he used hyperbole, which I did as well in referencing Lenin.
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They're already breeding in captivity. Have you looked in their mother's basements?
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With proper care and feeding, we may be able to get them to breed in captivity :)
Why in the world would you want to do that? It's not like there's a shortage. That would be like a concerted effort to cultivate kudzu cross bred with poison ivy.
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we've got a lot of dumb asses making comments about how it communist to not be for the full completely unregulated economy that they want. Never mind that Adam Smith felt very strongly that such an economy wouldn't work because
Yeah, well, Adam Smith was a commie-symp bastard, then! Patooie!
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Someone is standing a bit to the left of Lenin. Oh, and as far as cyber wars go, the one between 4chan and Youtube seems to be heating up!
Shhhh! You don't want Barack to shut down the internet [cnet.com], do you?
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I don't know, I mean if it takes 4chan with it...
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4chan is just the online manifestation of sociopathic forces which have been in effect for the entire existence of civilization. You're essentially stating your desire to stick your head in the sand, as the metaphor goes.
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That breeze that just messed up your hair was the joke going over your head. Would you like a phonebook?
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rupert murdoch gets his stomach upset when he sees one ? or, fox news says so ?
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No, The Economist seems to be blowing the government, at least in this case.
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So long as they're not blowing a vuvuzela, who cares.
Re:So you are taking Economist seriously. (Score:5, Informative)
Economist is a private interest mouthpiece that serves whatever their financiers tell them to do, depending on what their backers need as policy at any given period. Judging from the contents of your summary, one can easily say that this time the group they are licking the boots of is RIAA.
The Economist has been around since 1843.
It is anchored in a classically liberal and centrist tradition - and has never been particularly well-known for boot-licking.
Too often when visiting here I find evidence that the eternally adolescent geek simply can't accept that there can be a principled opposition to his own set beliefs.
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And that's not (by far) their most disputable position.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion and every publication is entitled to publish what it feels should be published, and to cover the news with the angle it sees fit.
but afterwards you have to either take responsibi
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Are you kidding? "The Economist" is the print edition of MENSA - anyone stupid enough to buy into either one shows that they're not really all that smart.
The real genius is in milking the "sophisticates".
Moo!
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While it would not surprise me at all if that's true, the 'whitepaper' referenced in the summary reads like a poorly researched conspiracy theory. It says this about the Wall Street Journal without providing a reference:
It also makes claims about attrib
Re:So you are taking Economist seriously. (Score:5, Informative)
The Economist is the world's best weekly newspaper. If you read what they say about the RIAA [economist.com], including the first article which mentions how the RIAA's agressive tactics aren't working and are a lesson to other industries on what _not_ to do, you'd know that the Economist takes a moderate view on intellectual property.
In particular, they often report on academic research showing that IP laws are too strong. For instance, this article [economist.com] (subscription required) called "Killing Creativity" is about how overly strong IP laws can smother innovation.
Not since the crash (Score:3, Insightful)
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Economist is a private interest mouthpiece that serves whatever their financiers tell them to do,
Or, as the paper referenced in the summary suggests, their reporters are suceptible to manipulation of public opinion by organizations like the CIA.
Judging from the contents of your summary, one can easily say that this time the group they are licking the boots of is RIAA.
The RIAA doesn't have to hide their agenda. They might make up outlandish statistics, but they are pretty straightforward about the problem being piracy rather than cyberterrorism.
Someone (the CIA?) is angling for control over the Internet. But they can't sell it based on their actual agenda. That sounds a lot like the sorts of propoganda operations they (the C
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i guess you have never read it before. Economist is a private interest mouthpiece that serves whatever their financiers tell them to do, depending on what their backers need as policy at any given period. Judging from the contents of your summary, one can easily say that this time the group they are licking the boots of is RIAA.
Look at how dumb you are.
yeap (Score:2)
"Turn off our electricity" (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security.
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems." Oh, sorry, I forgot that convenience is actually more important than anything else, so that will never happen.
Convenience? (Score:5, Interesting)
What's convenient about electrical grid systems designed to fail [cnet.com]? We've even had the East Coast power grid, which includes part of the midwest and Canada fall down, allegedly related to some idiot using Microsoft products in mission critical situations. We've also had extended air traffic shut downs [techworld.com] for the world's 8th largest economy. But hey check out that spin. The headline says it's the fault of the flunky who needs to reboot the Microsoft "server" every few hours, rather than hanging up the criminals who replaced working systems with Microsoft products.
Secure systems are convenient: they work.
Northeast Regional Power Outages 1965-2010 (Score:3, Informative)
We've even had the East Coast power grid, which includes part of the midwest and Canada fall down, allegedly related to some idiot using Microsoft products in mission critical situations.
1965 Nov 9 Northeast Blackout [wikipedia.org] Cascading series of transmission line overloads traced to safety relay at Niagara's Adam Beck station. (human error)
1977 July 13 New York City Blackout of 1977 [wikipedia.org] (Lightning strikes take out four transmission lines)
1998 January (ice storms)
1999 July 5 (Boundary Waters-Canadian Derecho)
2003 August
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Re:"Turn off our electricity" (Score:5, Informative)
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems."
The reason that some people give 'cyberwar' more thought than that is that it's not as simple as you make it out to be. I'm a coauthor on a DOE sponsored paper (under security review, so no citation for now) that covers some more subtle aspects of the problem. The electrical grid can be attacked by compromising the control system if that system is internet connected, true. However, if a significant proportion of the electrical load for any one generator can be controlled via the internet, then that generator can be attacked via the internet without requiring any direct internet contact. Case in point, X10, Google, Microsoft, and many other companies are currently looking into home automation and controlling the home's electrical system via the computer. So, what happens the next time there's a runaway MS worm, but instead of just sending spam it gives control of the home automation system to the attacker? Simply by turning the power off in enough houses in an area, an attacker could actually cause physical damage to the power plant.
That's why we can't just dismiss the problem as "unhook the power plants from the internet." In a world that's increasingly hooked to the internet, we can't afford to overlook how the internet-connected components can possibly have an effect on the non-connected components.
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In reality it's not an issue, since there are a minimum of three different systems between generator and end-user that would all have to fail simultaneously and catastrophically, and even then there is equipment built into the generator that monitors and compensates for an
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Or it's equivalent:
iptables -P INPUT DROP
iptables -P OUTPUT DROP
A-ha! A computer terminal! Mwhahahaha! (Score:5, Funny)
>Greetings Mr. President
>DOWNLOAD ALL SECRET FILES TO DISKETTE
Working....Done.
>DEORBIT SURVEILLANCE AND COMMUNICATION SATELLITES
Working...Done.
>TURN OFF NORTH AMERICAN POWER GRID
Working....D
.
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~ # ls
?
~ # cd
?
~ # login
?
~ # jsmith
?
~ # help
?
~ # ^D
?
~ # ^C
?
~ # ?
?
~ # I AM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES
?
~ #
You see, edsh has completely thwarted the attack. It is for this reason, that it will soon be declared the standard shell.
beware of Love Machine! (Score:2)
Why did the article make me flash on this anime? [wikipedia.org]
Doomsday BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Gotta love this paragraph:
What will cyberwar look like? In a new book Richard Clarke, a former White House staffer in charge of counter-terrorism and cyber-security, envisages a catastrophic breakdown within 15 minutes. Computer bugs bring down military e-mail systems; oil refineries and pipelines explode; air-traffic-control systems collapse; freight and metro trains derail; financial data are scrambled; the electrical grid goes down in the eastern United States; orbiting satellites spin out of control. Society soon breaks down as food becomes scarce and money runs out. Worst of all, the identity of the attacker may remain a mystery.
If you enable above-mentioned critical infrastructure to be controlled over a public network (no matter how well secured), that's a design flaw. Any damage from that should go on the account of the boneheads that designed things that way, not on cybercriminals that find a way in & abuse it. It's okay to use network-connected equipment to help optimize / monitor whatever public utility. But the controls should always go through (on-site) humans and/or network-independent systems.
Such doomsday think is BS anyway: if you keep the above in mind, it couldn't happen as long as attacks are limited to network / cyberwar operations. In case of physical attacks: that's a whole different ballgame. And if systems are designed such that network break-ins alone can disrupt critical infrastructure, then you deserve whatever you get.
Re:Doomsday BS (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, your supposition is incorrect.
They DO allow the controls to be accessible in that way. Even with the best designed systems, screwups occur and with disturbing frequency in this space.
I concur that they should be designed in the right way for this sort of stuff, by the way, but again, they're not and probably won't be for a while yet to come. FUD? Perhaps. Perhaps not. The problem is that there's a disturbing amount of truth within it that people keep dismissing here and elsewhere. It IS quite as bad as people have been claiming it is within this space- and unless you work with the segment, whether it be with the utilities or things like subways, you might not get that there REALLY is a problem that needs fixing and think it purely conjecture or outright lies to generate money for themselves.
It's not. With the grid in the shape it's in and with them carelessly exposing the control networks in manners that they can be manipulated via remote, there is a possibility, very real, very distinct, that someone could manage something that'd make the 2003 East Coast Blackout look like a Sunday picnic.
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If you get access to the management interface, you can do damned near anything to it including deorbiting the thing. It's just that simple. The management interface is on a computer likely to be accessible via the Internet in some fashion, through a botnet compromised machine or similar. Given a bit of effort, I probably could do that much myself- and I'm little more than an old-school grey-hat.
It's a lot less BS than you'd think.
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"...freight and metro trains derail"
Only if theres a buffer overflow....
Sounds like Y2K predictions (again, groan) (Score:2)
What will cyberwar look like?
pretty much presses all the buttons that the gullibly paranoid just love to swallow - after all, everyone loves a crisis.
The things is, all we can say about future threats is that they never turn out the way we've planned for them. Pearl harbour? who'd thought it? Sept 7? oops, didn't see that coming either. Fall of the USSR? dang! we never got to use all those nukes. So if / when there is what historians will look back on as cyberwar (or the first c
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The things is, all we can say about future threats is that they never turn out the way we've planned for them. Pearl harbour? who'd thought it? Sept 7? oops, didn't see that coming either. Fall of the USSR? dang! we never got to use all those nukes. So if / when there is what historians will look back on as cyberwar (or the first cyberwar), it almost certainly won't be the "war" that the government spent billions preparing for.
Cherry-picking. There are quite a number of threats that western governments have prepared for correctly, since it's a rare thing for intelligence to misreport the enemy's situation on the scale of 'Japan are not hostile'. The main point, however, is that Cyberwar, in the way this article describes it, is not going to happen, because it has little bearing on reality, in actuality or from the viewpoint of anyone but the Economist and anyone ignorant enough to believe them.
denial, even on Slashdot == we're boned (Score:4, Insightful)
For those of us in-the-know, it's painful to see people like you here on Slashdot. Due to NDA and various laws, we obviously can't go pointing out exactly how the USA truly is at risk.
Rest assured that this stuff is on the Internet, it's buggy as hell, it's misconfigured, and the passwords are as lame as you can imagine. We're already hacked into, at all levels, both government and private.
The main limitations for the attackers are a lack of obscure knowledge and their own preference for quietly stealing information. Why screw with a super-crufty undocumented railroad control system when you could be reading Hillary's email or picking up a copy of the F-35 radar software?
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Rest assured that this stuff is on the Internet, it's buggy as hell, it's misconfigured, and the passwords are as lame as you can imagine. We're already hacked into, at all levels, both government and private.
The sad thing is that 4 years ago I might have thought you were being a fear-monger. However, after working in a call center that handles gobs of information every day just to see management thinking that setting everyone's passwords to "1234" is a good idea because 1.) it's easy and 2.) having to remember passwords is too technical for pregnant teenagers and 20-somethings I completely believe you.
If a baby-mamma is inconvenienced in any way, especially any way involving using her brain, the stars will
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It might be a design flaw, but it's also the inevitable consequence of a free market economy...
The companies that put their control systems on VPN over public internet got by a heck of a lot more cheaply then their competitors. And they haven't yet been attacked badly enough so it's been cost-effective so far. Meanwhile their more robust competitors go out of business.
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If you read his 'Against All Enemies' and accepted it at face value you'd think he personally saved western civilization (audio book, long drive). If you really know the st
There do have to be consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
Before you start dismissing the article without reading it, they do have a very good point that cyberattacks by governments should have consequences for those for those governments. If Russia were to blow up the HQ of a company they didn't like, everybody would up in arms about, but if they hire a bunch of script kiddies to go in an wipe the company's server farm (effectively destroying the company), it probably wouldn't even draw a comment from the State Department. That's not a good precedent to set for the future...
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1) How do you know that the suspected attacker is the real attacker?
2) Why were they able to "wipe the copany's server farm"? Sounds like gross incompetence at the company. What happened to the backups?
(That said, backups often AREN'T sufficiently checked for readability...because of financial constraints. But that's still gross incompetence, only at the managerial level rather than at the operating level.)
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Before you start dismissing the article without reading it, they do have a very good point that cyberattacks by governments should have consequences for those for those governments. If Russia were to blow up the HQ of a company they didn't like, everybody would up in arms about, but if they hire a bunch of script kiddies to go in an wipe the company's server farm (effectively destroying the company), it probably wouldn't even draw a comment from the State Department. That's not a good precedent to set for the future...
That sounds like good, common sense. However, the situation isn't that simple. As others noted, it's difficult to identify an attacker. That difficultly exists for different reasons.
First - simply identifying an attacker is difficult. A single attacker has multiple avenues. Their control path can jump through multiple nodes from various types of networks and various nationalities with different legal structures. Those can be simple proxies, compromised hosts, or botnets. Identifying a single attacker
And the schools will make money off of it, too (Score:3, Interesting)
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read other articles the author has written (Score:1)
He was popular for a while after 9/11, at the time he attempted to make it seem as though he was the lone force in the world that had been warning of the threat, and a ll of the powers that be ruffled his hair and told him to be on his way... and now weren't they all sorry they hadn'rt listened. As was the case before, is seeming to be the case now, an author with enough of a grasp of the siuation to make an intelligent commment is simply not enough, he chooses to muddle the waters with a blatantly personal
New meaning of cyber (Score:2)
Given all the cyber-this and cyber-that, I think cyber has taken on a new meaning in the past several years:
Cyber (prefix) - signal to reader that he need not think critically about what follows.
It's a shortened version of the phrase using a computer, which has also had the same meaning in the context of patents.
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Cyber war got its provenance from Georgia and Estonia. The U.S. had nothing to do with it.
The taxes were never raised to cover the wars. They should have been. They will in the future.
Drones didn't make war more popular, look at the current poll numbers on the wars. They are an effective military option. The Taliban and Al Qaeda got their start well before the U.S. discovered drones. The Taliban and Al Qaeda continued the fine tradition of Islamo-Fascists of death to all who are not Muslim...and those who a
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I have no idea what the submission is about (Score:2)
There is so much editorializing in the submission, and so little explanation, that I have no idea what the submission is about.
Stick to the facts in the submission. The rest belongs in comments.
Hey! The Internet is immutable, someone tell them! (Score:2)
When attribution is a lost cause (and it is), international treaties are meaningless
So the summary's argument is based on the Internet as it is, and the nations forming these international treaties being powerless to change it.
If you honestly believe that, you deserve what you're going to get. Look at the histories of these nations and say with a straight face they cannot change the Internet. Don't say they wont; the very fact that other nations are involved gives them every reason to.
Not alarmist enough. (Score:2)
More FUD Marketing... (Score:2)
The wisc.edu is a very good school and nice apple and microsoft place, but not a leader in lockdown anything.
Talking policy with comparatively little or no heuristic experience in the field, does typically indicate a political/corporate agenda, but I could not locate any connection with any FUD/dogma bbbeast.
Anyway war and crime are two different levels of malevolence. War involves total (domestic/external) cultural participation, but crime is a more internal local and limited harm to citizens.
Acts/laws tha
Bizarre articles (Score:3, Interesting)
The articles in the latest edition are really bizarre. They totally deviate from the quality I'm accustomed to, so much that I wondered what's going on and was about to write a LTTE.
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And now for an entirely different tack (Score:2)
I'm not the brightest bulb on the block and that manifests it self as fear when I don't understand something. I am petrified of cancer and of some sort of sudden brain injury (my dad suffered many strokes before his death and my mom died of cancer). The author of the article probably has a couple of fears too. Couple that with his 'marching orders" which was probably something like "Write a doom and gloom article about the cyber-security risks to America's infrastructure for July 4th" and you get a super
Cyberwar 1.0 will be Microsoft only. (Score:2)
The New Fear (Score:2)
The problem every politician faces is that without some mind-gripping fear, for which the politician has *The Answer*, it is hard to unseat an incumbent. Cyber warfare is the New Fear.
Without the prospect of CYBER WARFARE, the critical infrastructure on which our political process takes place can remain controlled by private parties, some of whom are legitimately indifferent to the political process, even to the point where they are non-partisan, so long as the politician elect can be bought. This is c