Thursday, August 8, 2013

ATTACK OF THE KILLER WORMS

Imagine a world where the US throws its weight around on some minor issue in a faraway land and demands that some other country knuckle under pronto or face the wrath. OK, so that was too easy. Imagine if the world's little countries could fight back, quietly, secretly, anonymously. Now we're taxing the ole imaginerium. This great article describes an attack method virtually unknown to the low information density types and even those who live outside the beltway. While it blames our very good friends and bondholders the Chinese Techno Ninjas there is plenty of room in these new-fangled computer gizmos for lots of malicious and damaging code. I used to reel in shock and awe at the damage a one year old could do with just a random swipe of her fingers across a keyboard. I shudder to think what could happen if we collectively lost the ability to flush or turn on the TV.
Curt's Place as built in 1890
I'll be OK.

4 comments:

Anne Bonney said...

Yikes - and I am trying to picture the costume that Chinese Techno Ninjas would wear.

Buck said...

FWIW... I'm constantly bein' reassured by SN2 that our cyber defenses are better than I think. He doesn't/can't go into any detail for obvious reasons, but he does have a bit o' knowledge in that space. He worked in the cyber realm at STRATCOM, assignment before last. I find his reassurances ring vaguely hollow, though, particularly in the civilian world. I'm ten years removed from the bid'niz but I can tell you with GREAT authority that no one cared much about security until they got hacked.

HMS Defiant said...

Right after we won the Y2K War at SPAWAR our program was subjected to the twisted Information Assurance Vulnerability Assessment and a crew of hard nosed floppy jugglers wandered through our space slipping their little floppies into all our data fusion computers and GCCS-M machines. Our stuff got a virus off their floppies. It was also there that I read about a wonderful SIPRnet machine located on some ship that was also hardwired to an UNCLAS server.

If I hear these guys bleat about security I ask them how Manning and Snowden made off with so much classified data from machines that should not have had working USB ports.

HMS Defiant said...

Anne, they looked a lot like Japanese Ninjas or giant Arrakis sand worms.