Cyber Warfare

[Detonate]

I saw this on the news this morning. Interesting. I wonder if anyone stopped tho think that Eugene Kaspersky has a vested interest in trying to scare the attendees at the conference.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/...est=latestnews

[Telengard]

Re: Cyber Warfare

So I skimmed the first few paragraphs and thought, "he's not wrong." Which part of the story concerns you most?

[Detonate]

Re: Cyber Warfare

Nothing concerns me, except the probability that he has made an accurate prediction. I was just noting that the person that the person making the prediction has a lot to gain by raising apprehensions. I'm a born skeptic.

[woodsmoke]

Re: Cyber Warfare

Hi,

As telengard said, there really is nothing new here the thing that has everybody wringing their hands is that the "kick the can down the road" time was passed some while ago...it is now kicking one's toe on a BIG rock! >

I used to volunteer at what was known as "Castle Cops" many years ago and even then the number of items of concern was getting to where it looked like they would expand exponentially, but almost all of it was pretty run of the mill, ..."I never clicked on a porno site..." kind of thing....a lot of it was keyloggers etc. from people trying to get credit card numbers, not very successful because it was still in the "manual" stage, the bad guys search engines were "iterative" and would take a long time to find something.

One "could" blame most of this on the attitude of the internet people and computer people in general who looked at the early hackers as "just misguided kids", and the big bad business people actually SHOULD be hacked...

My....how things have changed....


The original attitudes were again, toward a "person".... the latest iteration is Julian Assange..... that he is a Robin Hood trying to help the little guy... or being Don Quixote tilting at the windmill of "freedom"....

However, one of the local colleges had it's "credit cards" hacked and somebody in France was charging on them. All of the college's cards had to be closed, which affected simple things like the purchasing toity paper, when nobody can use the toitys in the college there are major problems!

People think in terms of "the ARMY being hacked!!"....but the problem extends far beyond that.


Nobody even considered the concept of "synergism"...in which one program feeds on another and the merging of programs to produce something that is almost a thing that is more than the sum of it's parts...

Like DNA, change one little adenine or guanine or triplet and one has a whole new organism that the firewall has not seen before.

And all of this occuring at what might best be called an exponential rate.

things change when it is YOUR credit card hacked or YOUR firetruck that gets sent the wrong direction or YOUR hospital records being exposed.

Again, all a matter of scale.

woodsmoke

[SteveRiley]

Re: Cyber Warfare

Having worked in information security for most of my career, I find it interesting to see how the reporting of computer attacks has moved from the back pages of academic computer journals to the front pages of popular news sites (although relying on Faux News for science reporting seems dubious...)

My intuition tells me that while the rate of attack growth might be n, the rate of reporting attack growth is 2^n (exponential growth). I feel like we've passed the point where these curves intersect, and now the growth rate of news articles exceeds the growth rate of actual on-line crime.

Pointing to China and Russia as the source of most attacks is disingenuous and dangerous. Attacks can be crafted to appear from anywhere.

For those interested in better balanced reportage of information security, I strongly recommend following the writings of two people: Bruce Schneier and Marcus Ranum. Neither of these gentlemen is driven by some agenda. They are super smart guys who think long-term and excel at understanding and evaluating risk without allowing emotion to cloud judgment.