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E-terrorism, Bark or Bite?
packeteer writes: "Huge multi-part article on CNET news about electronic terrorism. The article has some interesting scenarios about posible types of attacks. It also has some good info about whats being done to prevent attacks as well as some info about media-hype that's put on 'hackers'. Good read."
I in Europe see this as a strange thing. Media in USA just whips and whips up old dust. It's almost a year and the people still are constantly reminded of the thing that happened. Somewhy the people are kept frightened, someone likes it. Perhaps to justify military budget and raise the ratings of certain politicians. Is the threat really so imminent? Has there been a real open investigation? Sometimes I feel the US government is the real terror to the people, not the zeal-driven desperate madmen of Middle-East.
What's the biggest rage in the world right now? The Internet.
They have the internet on computers now?
As such, the fact that it's a magic black box that is connected to everything means that it's a danger, and needs to be regulated.
There is a very real danger in that many systems that have no material reason for being on the internet are accessible from the internet: Maybe the control systems company thought it'd be more economical than using a private frame relay, or they wanted to be able to put in their presentations "Internet enabled". We're talking about the control systems for hydroelectric dams, some power generation and control facilities, traffic control systems, etc. The danger in these cases is very real.
However, personally I would completely agree that there should be a heavy amount of regulation. For instance, each ISP needs to have some onus of responsibility for the traffic originating from them to peering partners. I'm not saying that UUNet needs to censor alt.binaries.*, but rather that a massive DOS attack originating from UUNet sources should be quenched by UUNet and should not be allowed to saturate the destination. There are a myriad of situations like that where the internet is far too reckless (for instance, as has been mentioned in a million postings otherwise, all ISPs should dump packets which contain functionally invalid source IPs. It's pretty trivial stuff).
Myth of eletronic terrorism (trollish site, but still interesting)
Definition of electric terrorism.
Tips on preventing electronic terrorism.
Opinion article by a MIT student about overreacting to terrorism.
First article I can find mentioning electronic terrorism