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Is the Cyberterror Threat Credible?
Scott Pinzon writes "Is the idea that cyber terrorists might take down US networks or utilities realistic, or over-hyped? One of the authors of the Patriot Act and several Black Hat 2005 speakers debated the issue informally at WatchGuard's "Security and Beer Roundtable." Participants include Dan Kaminsky, Johnny "Google Hacker" Long, Tim Mullen, Sensepost penetration testers, a guy from Microsoft's ISA team, and others."
As long as the country can afford it.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
No, there is no threat posed by cyberterrorism. It's just a way to make the federal government feel justified in paying CISSPs $1000 an hour for pen testing. Yes, there are people on contracts like this.
M
Who cares if the power company's website is defaced or their web server brought down? That won't lead to the lights going out.
The question is not whether the threat from cyberterrorism (what a stupid term) is credible, but who in their right mind sees it necessary to put critical systems online?
If you want to take out half the internet, you don't need hackers. A backhoe works just fine. So why in the world would anyone put such important things on a network that is easily disabled?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
What kind of security clearance do you need to do that?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Criminals that use computers for fraud and other crimes should be described by a less stupid and emotive term than cyberterrorism.
Personally, I don't feel in any way threatened by any word, phrase, or sentence with the prefix "cyber" in it. Cyber*, to me, means a way for non-geeks to explain something that they don't in any way understand.
Frankly, I think most terror threats aren't credible. My philosophy is that in most cases, if you're on the ball enough to understand a threat, it's not threatening. The real terrorism are the attacks (cyber and...um...Analog?) that come from behind.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
The Bush administration has been warning of a digital Pearl Harbor for years.
However, their desire to collect and to centralize information on government computers for 'homeland security' purposes makes such a threat more dangerous, not less dangerous.
If their proposals for government-accessible backdoors for all encryption were actually to become reality, then a single successful hacker could compromise millions of secure computers and documents in a single attack.
The best solution is to go back to the policies of Clinton's presidency. Let us, the people, take care of our own security without government intrusion, as is our natural right and privilege.
We live in a culture of fear.
First it's anthrax (anyone remember that?)
Then it's suitcase nukes..
Then it's bird flu..
Suddenly terrorists are going break into our computers?!
All of these are existant 'problems' blown WAY out of proportion. I'm counting the days before termites are found in the whitehouse, thus becoming the next terrorist threat.
Cyberterrorism is a stupid word.
But beyond that, there are easier targets.
Railroads carry tanks full of lovely chemicals like SO4 and HCl. For commercial efficiency, they often put all the tank cars together. For historical reasons, the railroads, state highways, and interstates often run close together and intersect. Not far from where I am now is an intersection of two interstate highways, two state highways, two US routes, and a railroad.
Take out the tank cars and drive away in any direction.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
The broader question: is the treat of terrorism credible? Considering that politicians made up the whole concept of "the terror network" from disinformation planted in european newspapers and then failed to listen to the CIA when they told them the Soviet Union was not funding terrorist groups and in-fact it was the CIA that was planting the propaganda, how can we possibly believe that terrorism is capable of any more than the few isolated incidents that have befallen the world in the last dozen years? We're talking about a total number of deaths less than a year of ordinary people driving cars on the national highways. The chances of becoming a victim of terrorism are less than the chances of being hit by falling space debris.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Maybe. But probably not. If terrorists use a computer to do something that kills people, its regular terrorism. If somebody screws with my computer, that person is not a "cyber-terrorist," he is just a regular criminal (and also, likely, a douchebag.)
So maybe what I mean is... no, it isn't remotely credible.
Who did what now?
I don't know about a cyberterrorist, per se, but there sure are a lot of compromised machines out there. Anyone remember the article that quoted an estimated 200,000 zombies added every day?
2 /alan-cox.html:
Alan Cox said it best in this interview http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2005/09/1
"We are still in a world where an attack like the slammer worm combined with a PC BIOS eraser or disk locking tool could wipe out half the PCs exposed to the internet in a few hours."
Y2K - Nuff said.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The question "is the threat of cyberterror credible or overblown" can only be answered "yes" -- thus the qustion is invalid. Is cyberterror a credible threat? In that it is possible and, if it were to occur, threatening, the answer is yes. Is this threat overblown? Yes.
~UP
Eat the Path.
It's incredible.
I'm not sure that's really what you want. IIRC, the attempts to make key escrow mandatory with Clipper were on Clinton's watch. The sooner we quit believing that one party or another is interested in freedom, the sooner we have a chance to preserve the dwindling amount of it we have left.
I too have felt the cold finger of injustice.
...to happen due to "cyber attacks" from "cyber terrorists". It's going to happen instead because the USA has abdicated control over its own technology destiny to foreign governments (e.g. China for hardware, India for software and tech support, etc.)
Why are there so many Chinese probing my ports? They seem really interested in 1025-1027.
For everyone jumping on the term "Cyber", and not taking the spirit of this debate seriously - You really should take a closer look. It really is scary how many mission critical systems out there (especially Windows) are vulnerable to attack.
One word - SONY
If your power grid can be operated online, then of course there's a threat that this can be used by malicious people. If the risk outweights the benefits, then don't put it online. Maybe they should just have read "Building Secure Linux Servers" (O'Reilly), instead of passing the patriot act (that is used for different purposes now, btw). That law isn't going to decrease the risk.
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
Fear is a fantastic way to control people and get big dollars into big lobbiests pockets. It is also a good way to divert focus from real issues.
Unfortunately these measures only give a false sense of security. All the aircraft carriers can't stop a few punks with box cutters from hijacking a plane or whatever.
Huge security measures in the internat will be equivalent to airport security. Pain in the ass (in more ways than one), queues, loss of service etc for Joe Average and ineffective.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Here's the deal. No one thought that commercial passenger flights would be used as manned missles either, until after it happened. Let's assume for a moment that it is an actual threat. How do we defend against it? Simply, we cannot. There are no "national" border on the internet. We aren't able to block undesirable traffic from any given locale thanks to how the peering points on the internet actually function. If they're in the country, it's equally impossible to isloate them, because the peering points aren't configured in such as way as to isolate that either. If you're connected to the internet, it's basically an all or nothing proposition. The only place you have any control is at your perimeter. Not planning for the obvious is what got us into this mess in the first place. Quit playing ostrich. We HAVE to start planning for things, even if we don't consider them to be particulary possible. The rule of force applies here. For those of you that aren't familiar with it, it goes something like this: You do not pit your strength against your enemy's strength. You pit your strength against your enemy's weakness. That means you look for what is not defended, what is not prepared for, and that then becomes your target.
2 cents,
Queen B
HDGary secures my bank
I don't know if it will happen from what we think of as terrorists, but I'll go on record saying that we'll eventually have a Nightmare worm.
It could have already happened, but perhaps the worm writers had a conscious. There will be a worm that 0-day exploit that compromises a common MS Windows service and isn't so polite as SQL-Slammer. Slammer infected almost every vulnerable host in the world within 10 minutes. I would call Slammer a 'polite' worm as it did no harm other than flooding networks.
It's certainly possible to write an impolite worm. One that doesn't just spread itself, but after 20 minutes of attempting to spread itself decides to stop all of your services and then wipe the data off your hard drive. If a computer isn't directly affected, it will probably be affected downstream by the network traffic or reliance on Windows network services. Those that managed to survive may have a hard time finding other surviving resources.
Hopefully the business world has backups, but can you imagine the global disaster that would follow? In 30 minutes almost every computer in the world is down. Airlines will be grounded, you may lose electricity, you might not be able to order a mocha frappancino(tm) at your favorite fourbucks.
(Not to be judgemental, but in today's world if it doesn't target Windows it's not the Nightmare worm)
Kind thoughts do not change the world
Further on that, no one knows for sure what the terrorists are really trying to say. If they had the smarts to carry out a DDOS, they could certainly post an encrypted manifesto on the internet before blowing up a car and post the keys to decrypt it after the attack. That would deliver their message far better than the media or government ever would. If they aren't sophisticated enough to do that, I don't think we need to worry about them carrying out a cyberattack (as if it would have substantially more impact than the worms running around the internet at this very moment).
Right now terrorist groups around the world have a lot of cash, a lot of weapons, and a lot of their members in prisons or in hiding. Governments around the world are mastering a new sort of doublespeak where they deny that they are locking terrorists, their supporters, and any innocents who end up in the line of fire; the most successful terrorists these days are in cities that slack off for a little while (The London Bombings), Palestinians bombing Israelis, and every suicidal wack-job that can afford bus fare into Iraq. Since September 11 dozens of terroist plots have been foiled around the world. If you're a terrorist, trying to pull off another big bombing is looking harder everyday, and actually getting away with it is probably impossible (Assuming you aren't a suicide bomber.).
So then you see old reports floating around in that certain intelligence, defense, etc. agencies of your enemies are known for boneheaded employees that violate policy and do stupid stuff like connecting NT4 desktops to both the internet and classified government WANs because you find using a KVM inconvenient. So you buy a botnet from the Russian mob, hire someone to hack the botnet to find it's way into some of these systems, and look for interesting intel to leak. Or maybe you look for more poorly secured Visa/Mastercard servers to hack into, but after you steal all of the credit card numbers, you send important credit card servers into spasms - after all, who cares if you get caught? You're in Pakistan and the guy doing the hacking is moving around the Middle East working from satellite connections in underground net cafes, credit card fraud convinctions are not a big issue. Or hey, maybe you really want to screw with western economies, so you watch the airline web sites 24/7, waiting for a security slipup that lets you get into Sabre's computers, and knock them offline, taking out air-travel in the US for at least a few hours.
Or maybe you're a gun nut working at a power plant, and convinced that Hillary Clinton will win the 2008 election and bring the Illuminati in to take your guns away, so you decide to kill the power to New York City on election day. Or a DBA and anti-abortion activist who isn't committed to bombing clinics or sniping doctors, but happy to cut off Blue Cross payments to every doctor and hospital that offers abortions in the USA.
My point here is that Islamic extremists have a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of nutty little helpers, and they're bound to get bored and look for new ways to screw with the western world. Domestic terrorists are in a similar position, but for them it's even harder to resort to traditional attacks, because in their case the FBI actually speaks their language. At some point they'll decide that cyberterrorism sounds like a good idea and try it out.
It's not the complete take-down of the USA's electronic infrastructure that should worry you. After all, that would hurt everyone. This is what's more realistic:
Titan Rain was covered on slashdot before, but the linked Time article has since gone premium. A quick google search brings up this and this, though I'm not sure how reliable they are since they're random Google search results.
Ah, here's a ZDnet article. Might not all be FUD.
I was working at home on 9/11, and yes: CNN was down until they put up a no-graphics static page. Slashdot was up and running just fine.
Anent to the article, I think the so-called cyberterror threat is not so much Al Qaeda as it is Eastern European organized crime, and the threat is more centered towards e-commerce (Amazon, eBay, gambling sites) than public infrastructure.
Al Qaeda wants to perform acts that make people afraid to go to work, not acts that keep them from bidding on Beanie Babies or playing Texas Hold-em. DDos-ing Amazon or Partypoker.com isn't the sort of deadly blow against the infidels that gets them out of bed in the morning. Yuri and Vladimir, on the other hand...
But the real "cyberterror" threat is the potential US Government overreaction towards any potential threat, real or imagined. Since the early '90s, the government has viewed the Internet as something big, scary, and untamed. COPA, DMCA, you name it, they'll regulate it. Even now, look at the way the Federal Election Commission has been eyeballing political blogs: free speech or political contributions?
If there's a threat, it'll be from Capitol Hill or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, not some cave on the Afghani-Pakistani border.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
The Bush administration has been warning of a digital Pearl Harbor for years.
You mean Richard Clark, appointed by Clinton, as mentioned in the article you link to?
The best solution is to go back to the policies of Clinton's presidency. Let us, the people, take care of our own security without government intrusion, as is our natural right and privilege.
Hm.
Oh and then there the airlines (no flights today because the screens are down), factories (no parts from suppliers), UPS (we don't know where your package is), etc. The U.S economy, even the bricks-and-mortar part is heavily net-dependent. The lights may stay on, but a good chunk of commerce would slow or halt.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The most relevant fact here is that the risk of damage to any infrastructure (or resource) is directly proportional to the dependance on the resource. Bringing down telecommunications networks (mobile phone towers et al despite all failsafe mechanisms) before a terrorist attack can aid in adding to terror and confusion. Breaking down the only highway link out of a city (speculating) and then initating terror attacks can add to the terror. So, as we get more and more dependent on the internet, slowing down or causing mass DoS attacks all over the internet can send the international community (not just a country, as the internet pervades borders) into a terror mode. Inducing panic and terror in larger communities or population seems to be one of the key objectives of terrorists. In today's context the percentage of internet "dependant" populace in both developed and developing nations is not saturated nor does it encompass large volumes (as of recent internet usage and pc accessibility surveys pertaining to the digital divide.)
Few like slashdotters would probably depend entirely on the net for news updates, sports updates, weather updates, travel bookings, commerce (name it). But as more people start transacting both goods and information over the net, breaking it down will induce panic and terror by itself. The attacks may not be restricted to DoS (Denial of Service) but may also include falsifying transactions, harrassment, defacing individuals and so forth. Recent harrassment against a relative of mine using anonymous remailers was untraceable (which was possible through the internet). Unfortunately no investigating authority or institution was able to help out. So it is time that one anticipates and starts building up a defense system against a really plausible threat. Method and Procedure however (against cybercrime and cracking) have always been questionable; as has been the competence of the enforcing authorities.
No Greater Friend, No Greater Enemy! (Lucius Cornelius Sulla)
Yes, I know that deaths due to terrorism is low statistically-speaking. Honestly, it's not something that I spend awake nights worried about. Overall, I'm probably a lot like you in feelings about the terrorist threat. Statistically speaking, it's so far into the noise that maybe it should be ignored.
The problem with this way of thinking, though, is that most ordinary people believe that terrorism is not an act of God, and that it is, in some way, a preventable issue. When it comes to auto accidents, ordinary folks want to put controls on those items that can lower the risk of death (preventing DUIs, speed limits, mandatory seat belt laws, etc). It's the same with other deadly issues--like how people want McD's to have healthy choices on their menus because heart disease is so prevalent (now, whether people make good choices is another issue...). Or smoking--how much energy/money has been spent on getting people to stop?
People can accept deaths. It's a normal fact of life, and it sucks when it hits close to home. It sucks even more when those deaths could have been prevented with simple measures. If a party got out of control and a guy that was totally blitzed got behind the wheel and kills your wife/husband/mom/sis/friend/etc, you'd be pretty darned pissed and that incident would leave a hole inside you that might not ever heal completely. That's reality. Also, you, being a responsible citizen and registered voter, would be so upset and hurt that you just might demand more steps be taken to prevent others from feeling how you do. So, you call your local politian.
Economically speaking, no deaths are without consequenses. If it's preventable, then it can be calculated how much the solution would cost and how many deaths it would prevent. Those "non-dead" people earn incomes and pay taxes. If those expected taxes are greater than the proposed solution, then we have a winner. Of course, not all decisions are made based on pure economics. Many people are simply willing to pay higher taxes in favor of more safety, just because we like not having to go to our loved one's funerals.
I do understand what you're saying, and the rational part of my brain agrees. The part that hates going to funerals, though, tells me that if a death can be prevented, maybe we should go out of our way a bit to prevent it.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
The DOD already operates a separate internet for classified material. It's known as the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network, or SIPRNet. So yes, an alternative "G-Internet" is more than feasible - it already exists.
so then the authorities cannot properly communicate!
I've seen lots about not probable or not possible but lets look at it this way, how big is the internet? next question how many possible methods of terrorism can exist? some I can think of are; air traffic control (die hard style); automated flood gate control (I've seen HPsUX computers that do this); what about the manipulation of satellites; and affecting train routes, collisions and subway disasters?
If you really think about it anything technological that requires a computer is at risk to "cyber"terrorism.
Now okay most of these services are not live on the internet and can't be done in some afghani basement, but on US shores with the proper utilisation of inside Intel of infrastructure, social engineering, etc.
Looking beyond the simple break down of the technical problems associated with such a threat look at the practical day-to-day ones..
Makes it a little bit more plausible.
Personally, I don't feel in any way threatened by any word, phrase, or sentence with the suffix "terror" in it. *terrorist, to me, means a way for Americans to explain something that they don't in any way understand.
#irc.eskimo.org
[partygirl] Hey osama, do you want2 cyber?
[osama] o rly! O_o
The real danger is of a terrorist attack that coincides with a cyber attack taking down emergency response info systems, or otherwise hampering the ability of emergency services to deal with the incident.
For starters, not pissing off other countries, by having abusive/manipulative policies. I'm sure there are other ways to ward off an attack of any sort, and the easiest way is to not have that enemy in the first place!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
W00tkits of Mass Destruction (WMDs) are all over the place, man.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Do whatever needs to be done. But keep the pr0n flowing.
Are you...Are you some kind of genius?
No, ma'am, I'm just a regular Slashdot reader.
As a security researcher, I can say without hesitation: of course the threat is credible. The vulnerabilities are here, each day a dozen of them are discovered in major applications [1]. And competent security researchers exist around the world (e.g. 75% of windows vulnerabilities are discovered by external independant researchers [2]).
Now the only reason why cyber terrorism is not more frequent and more harmful (it is almost inexistent but it *does* exist) is the relatively few number of black hats (bad guys) compared to the huge number of white hats out there, and probably also the lack of motivation of the potential attackers.
[1] Look at this graph.
[2] Look at the credits in MS security bulletins.
Perhaps we should diversify, so that it becomes impossible for hackers/terrorists/whatever-term-you-want-to-use to bring down the entire network. We should use a wide variety of operating systems, a wide variety of servers, a wide variety of browsers and a desentralized network..... wait, we already do!
Good job geeks in making it harder to hack the network.
Wikipedia article on SCADA
357c3435686430372052757c3335 (A cookie for anyone who decodes that.)
5|45hd07 Ru|35
And for those that don't speak 1337 - Slashdot Rules
english is way to easy
"Hey, what does this link - AH!!!! THE GOA***!!! MY EYES!!!!"
If that's not TERROR, I don't know what it is.
..ONLY if Tom Clancy Says so, I guess Cyber "Terrorism" can be credible.
Someone should link http://weblogawards.org/2005/12/best_technology_bl og.php (requires IE) as Slashdot is up for best technology blog. It's already winning by a lot, but 520 votes is pitiful!
That's another word for the filter, "Cyberterrorism."
/. are saying, this stuff shouldn't even be in the news.
I wonder how this stuff makes news anyway. Soon we'll have these pompeous dicks addressing games like WoW as "Cyber-cocaine," attempting to make it sound as if its addictive as the drug itself. Honestly who the hell comes up with these crappy titles? I mean, these are the same assholes who pulled that "Y2K" scam on everyone, people no different from making "Y2K compliant" appliances, and now, here we are again except we jumped from an alphanumeric word, into a strictly "Cyberterroristic" notion. Let me guess, "This computer is Cyberterror compliant?" Pfft, what a bunch of bs. Even judging from what other people on
Another thing, what the hell is up with a "Digital Pearl Harbour" ? Last time I checked Pearl Harbour was deliberately planned by the US so they can get back at Japan. Not a hint or anything but these journalists (not to be confused with bloggers) have too much time on their hands when they try to convey what they think is going to happen and accidently forget to read up on history of World War 2. I'll be expecting "Trojan Airplanes" soon enough.
Nice 0-day "Nightmare" exploit, sounds so fun I might as well run my unix on a backup generator. Great change from September 11, 2001 assholes. You took a regular word and added "Terror[-ism]" to it. Real smooth.
No, 0x10 !!
Decentralization = less security and more redundancy.
Centralization = more security (IE manageable and locked down) and less redundancy.
Pick one, you can't have both.
Life is not for the lazy.
The Bush administration has been warning of a digital Pearl Harbor [cnn.com] for years.
;-)
Pikers and latecomers.
The DOD has been warning of such things for decades
Back in the 60's, when the DOD's ARPAnet project was started, one of the design goals was that the network should have sufficient redundancy and intelligence so that when an enemy knocked out lines or relays, the software would just silently route around the break and keep the communication going.
This has been one of the more difficult things to implement. Not primarily for technical reasons, though. The problem is that when you hand the installation over to private businesses, they want to save costs by cutting corners. In particular, they try to eliminate redundancy whenever possible.
The result is that the commercial internet is riddled with single points of failure, and lacks the redundancy to handle even minor local outages by rerouting.
Criticising this of course means that you're one of those people who approves of government inefficiency.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
CyberTerrorism. Is not just linked to the internet.
Number one a Terrorist could clean out you bank accounts at the wrong time. Leave you stranded some where then take you idenity to get themselfs into a country.
Just a little though and you wake up and see trouble.
there won't be such a need for the great firewall of china will there?!
This is correct and I doubt it has been fixed.
it was one of the 'nets darker secrets -- e.g. a handful (or more) of people knew about the security hole
Considering that my networking professor told the whole class about it, there are more than a handful of people that know.
For those that don't know, the issue arises out of the way the internet does routing. IPv4 uses a flat routing system. Every key router on the internet knows how many hops away it is from all of the other key routers and which direction the router is in. Consider (the dots are placeholders so slashdot will display my beautiful ASCII art properly):
Router D knows that it is one hop away from router E. B knows that it is two hops from E. How? Because D tells B that it is one hop away from E, so if B sends a packet to D, D can deliver it in one hop. C knows that it is three hops away.
Now suppose router B goes down. C knows that it can't reach E through its usual three hops, but when it talks to its neighbor to the right, it sees that F can reach E in three hops, so C is now four hops away from E. Now when C sees traffic headed for E, it sends the traffic to F.
How do you poison the system? If one of the key trusted routers, such as C, tells everyone that they are two hops from everywhere, large portions of the internet will try to route through C. If you can take control of a trusted router in each of several key locations, you can confuse the overwhelming majority of the internet into thinking you are offering the best route to their destination.
The short route won't make a big difference for nearby traffic, but traffic headed ten or twenty hops away will wind up going towards C when it should go someplace else.
The above-described mechanism for updating the routing tables is the key to the internet's ability to automatically route around cities that have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon.
Of course the people who maintain those routers are likely to know something is up and simply cut their link to the poisoned router, ruining all the excitement.
The best solution is to go back to the policies of Clinton's presidency. Let us, the people, take care of our own security without government intrusion, as is our natural right and privilege.
Perhaps you're thinking of that other Clinton. Clinton banned assault rifles and large capacity magazines. Clinton also ignored Al-Quaida when they blew up Americans in Saudi Arabia and Africa.
And Cunningham is a real hoot: just the kind of guy you'd want writing paranoid legislation like the Patriot Act. My favorite Cunningham quote:
To which one can only exasperatingly respond: "Yes, and I have not heard anyone say that it's not technically possible for aliens to land on the White House lawn tomorrow!"
RTFA and decide for yourself whether it was a waste of time. Putting 10 supposedly bright security programmers into a discussion is apparently impossible, since each attempts to fill the room with his own ego. Was there any single thread that started at a reasonable place and drove to a reasonable conclusion?
Some interesting points were made but that's all. This should have been reframed as a brainstorming session whose purpose was to compose as many ideas as possible at one sitting. To describe it as a "debate" or even a "discussion" would be wrong - everyone present was talking and no one was listening.
We could hunker down, retreating behind a false sense of security, or we could bring a war to the cyber-terrorists, striking them before they could kill our connection to Slashdot
SCADA and digital control systems of critical infrastructure such as power (electrical grid), oil and gas distribution, water, sewer, telecommunications and most manufacturing processes are connected through firewalls to corporate LANs so that the metrics of the SCADA network can be monitored. Other routes to the SCADA systems exist so that the hardware/software vendors of the control system can perform patches and maintenance. Help systems on many SCADA networks use web based help which is vulnerable to client side browser attacks.
Corporate LANS are defiantly accessible to hackers. A knowledgeable hacker (who knows what tell tells to look for) will be able to identify SCADA networks and attack vectors after gaining a foothold on a corporate LAN.
As part of a team that performs pen testing on vendor systems and on in the field critical infra-structure (for a national lab) we have yet to encounter a SCADA network that did not have access to the corporate LAN. We have reversed engineered many of the communication protocols, and found buffer overflows and other exploits in the majority of the systems that we have tested. Though we are told that only one way communication exist between data stores on SCADA sub nets and the corporate LAN anyone who understands TCP communications knows that it is a two way protocol.
Attacks do not necessarily need to originate from the "internet" as Many field RTUs have non-authenticating dial up enabled, and can be found through intelligent war dialing.
As every nation state in the world has access to the same SCADA hardware and software, it is not beyond reckoning that they and well funded terrorist organizations are pursuing attack techniques against the systems the control all of the power grid, telecom systems etc. They need but purchase a system, study the standard installations, code base and protocols and find the exploits. The financial impact from a well executed cyber attack could be in the billions of dollars.
Fly Fish? Participate in our forum
Whenever a new virus or worm makes the news, we always here someone say "OMFG its a good thing this virus didn't do any real harm to infected systems".
,Format $all_network_drives, flash BIOS with random junk etc. This doesn't come close to knocking down buildings for emotional impact, but the dollar cost of a widespread and determined attack could be huge.
So how about this for a cyber terrorist scenario. Osama bin L. hires himself a room full of the finest Soviet hackers. They build a bunch of the most destructive virus payloads imaginable. The next time a new IE or windows vulnerability is announced they attach said evil payloads and launch them on day zero, before anybody has a chance to patch. Besides trying to infect as many other systems as possible, the virus payloads do as much damage as possible. Format C:
How do you make money from Cyber Terrorism? Right now, cyber crime is all about making money. When someone figures out how to make lots of money hacking power companies, they'll start hacking power companies.
The current Al-Qaeda mindset is for blood and guts. There's no fear to be generated by dropping someone's porn connection for 8 hours. Certainly foreign governments could potentially do great harm, but what is the point? Take out a trading partner? That's good for business. This is the reason web pages don't get defaced anymore. No money in it. Instead that hack the site and put up spyware/trojan installers, or run a phishing scam for a few hours.
I don't believe we'll see a major Cyber Terrorism type event unless we actually get into a major scuffle with another powerhouse, or Al-Qaeda figures out that dropping communications just after a major attack can amplify the fear by introducing uncertainty in coincidence with something fearful.
In any case, the most likely attack vector is a physical attack against cyber assets. Blow up substations, major telco POPs, radio/tv transmission towers. You get the point.
-SHP
Besides a "Nightmare" worm that could sweep across the entire internet within hours, there is also the distinct possibility of zombie computers that mass for a DDoS attack on key routers. There are also the "stupid things people do" clasification, like the instance about 6 months ago in which the emergency preparedness comm center for Washington, DC was repeatedly shut down by attacking the backup power systems' SNMP controls. Finally, many chemical, power generation, water purification facilities, etcetera use SCADA control systems that are exposed (stupidly) to the internet.
So there is a risk, especially with commercial and government facilities that do IT on the cheap, and without following "due diligence" security guidelines -- guidelines, I might add, that have never been thoroughly documented by the single government agency most responsible for establishing such policies -- the DHS.
IMHO, there exists a far greater risk th the USA though lackidasical border, seaport, and air cargo security, which has received even less attention than cyberterrorism. The regime currently in power has focused nearly all of its attention on the (optional) Iraq War, to the detrement of all other vulnerabilities. The response to civilian disasters like Katrina and Rita are prime examples of the Dubya regime's inept governance.
next cyberterrorism attack targeted for cybermonday!
Working as a contractor, I regularly visit data centres for purposes including physical installs of new hardware. In doing so, I've observed that the level of scrutiny applied to incoming hardware is in almost all cases negligible to non-existent.
So I begin to wonder...
How many 8RU server cases packed with explosives do you need to take out an entire floor of any given DC? How many more to take out the entire building?
What checks are applied against customers who purchase space in said DC? For instance, would it be possible to breach several different floors of several DC's simply by providing different falsified business details for each?
What impact could typically be inflicted upon providers who house their own infrastructure under the same roof as their tenants'?
I'll concede there may be more to carrying this out than meets the eye. But surely the prospect of a well-coordinated attack of this kind is far more credible (if not less lucrative in a fiscal sense) than all this so-called 'cyberterrorism' nonsense.
..."Internet Explorer" by thy name.
What other application could update itself weekly and be so intergrated with the OS that a complete removal would render the OS inoperable. Makes that Win32 virus that associated EXEs with itself look like child's play.
Hot-Swapping motherboards??? ROTFL. ROTFL!
some food for thought:
/. groupthink, and the fact that terrorists will be targeting the home (Windows) desktops as well for ease of viral spread and knowing that it will also cause terror to attack mom and dad's magic box
lets assume that roughly half off all Internet servers are run on linux/UNIX and the other half are run on Windows(TM).
-->from the majority of posts and watching slashdot and tech news alot, I beliive this is a reasonable assumption
assume that business (esp the big ones) make proper back ups of their systems.
lets also assume that the vast majority of desktop computers are run on Windows
--> this is also a reasonable assumption
we can also assume that any nightmare virus would target windows
--> supported by previous posts,
assume virus infections are worst case (destroy host computer through eraseBIOS, etc)
result:
vast majority of home users will lose their desktop
most businesses will lose their employee workstations (assuming vast majority = windows)
now the importand bit:
In the short term:
-chaos and panic, general headless chicken reaction
-ONLY HALF OF THE SERVERS GO DOWN (the half running windows)
-THE OTHER HALF STAYS UP!!!!! (good ol' solid apache and linux servers)
-The Internet will limp along on the half that stays up
Long term:
-Businesses restore their systems from backups after IT reflashes damaged BIOS's or what ever fix is found
-some joe sixpacks get new computers; others (geeks) repair theirs; some never touch a magic beige box again
((Optional aditional result:
people never trust Windows again and go to Linux and Apple))
Whoa whoa whoa, slow down here... Are you saying that if all countries ceased military research, development and maintenance we would magically end all warfare? What a great idea! You put down your weapons first. Don't worry, I'll be right behind you.
as well as (and not just) a moral compass, then do you think that country would be the target of attacks?
Last time I checked it wasn't morally correct to LEGALLY degrade women. (More or less all of the Middle East) Or to censor the freedom of speech. (China) Or to kill someone based on ethnicity. (Darfur) The list goes on, and yet the list of non-benevolent countries (besides the U.S.) fails to shrink.
Ok, maybe flamebait but here goes.
Yes there are critical systems on the internet. For those of you who think you're so smarty pants, "who would put crit systems out there", what about email? Or B2B? Or electronic trading on NYSE, NASDAQ, etc? Or, or, or.....
According to a study I read a couple of years ago, and unless this has changed in the last couple years, and I hope it has, there are only about 4 buildings in the US that need to go away and the internet would be virtually gone until they could be replaced.
A coordinated attack on these facilities could effectively remove all net communications in the US for who knows ho long. I imagine the recovery would take quite a long time.
For the first time in the history of Mankind, a Law will stop the related Crime.
Seriously, tell me why this is not just another ploy to make yet another invasive law that lets the govt. sleuths access your desktop easily, without any 'warrant' hassle ?
--
Root of America's predilection for gun violence
I guess what most of us who are /.'ers forget to realize is that most people are like the sheep on Animal Farm. The masses seem to just follow whatever our 'leaders' tell them to do. Like the sheep they (unlike most who read this) are, they'll do as they're told, and for the most part, no one will say otherwise. Those who do are generally either A) smothered by those who have the money, or B) ignored because they are not following in the path of 'group-think'.
People are so concerned about terrorism, just like they were the Monica Lewinski scandal. This is all merely based on the fact that CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC have told them that they are. What's crazier yet, is that our own government uses a form of slight terrorism to attempt to control the 'sheep', using those beautiful code colors for the terror threat against the US.
Basically what I'm getting at is, if the TV starts saying that cyberterrorism will kill us all, then by golly, you're going to see millions of retarded americans throwing their computers out the window.
The best way to end this, is this; Cyberterrorism is real, only if we (the masses) think it is. That's the same as normal terrorism. It really doesn't matter what any experts say, (We did find all those WMDs in Iraq, right?..... hahahaha) As long as the people in power and the people with money say it's so, we like the proverbial sheep we are, are doomed to follow their every word to the T.
What fool believes Cybermen are planning this? A sonic probe solves everything. Cyberterrorism is a nonsense word, computers kill no-one, and the Flying Dialeks are really, not real.
The word is vandalism, intrusion, or theft is. Any critical stuff on the web - well those responsible should get the sack AND picked up in an audit. Scheesh - Cyberstupididy and Cybermoron are the words needed. Katrina proved that.
Considering that my networking professor told the whole class about it, there are more than a handful of people that know.
For those that don't know, the issue arises out of the way the internet does routing. IPv4 uses a flat routing system. Every key router on the internet knows how many hops away it is from all of the other key routers and which direction the router is in. Consider (the dots are placeholders so slashdot will display my beautiful ASCII art properly):
[cute but erroneous diagram clipped to avoid lameness filter]
Router D knows that it is one hop away from router E. B knows that it is two hops from E. How? Because D tells B that it is one hop away from E, so if B sends a packet to D, D can deliver it in one hop. C knows that it is three hops away.
Now suppose router B goes down. C knows that it can't reach E through its usual three hops, but when it talks to its neighbor to the right, it sees that F can reach E in three hops, so C is now four hops away from E. Now when C sees traffic headed for E, it sends the traffic to F.
How do you poison the system? If one of the key trusted routers, such as C, tells everyone that they are two hops from everywhere, large portions of the internet will try to route through C. If you can take control of a trusted router in each of several key locations, you can confuse the overwhelming majority of the internet into thinking you are offering the best route to their destination.
The short route won't make a big difference for nearby traffic, but traffic headed ten or twenty hops away will wind up going towards C when it should go someplace else.
The above-described mechanism for updating the routing tables is the key to the internet's ability to automatically route around cities that have been destroyed by a nuclear weapon.
Oh good god, what complete and utter BS. Lest anyone believe this is actually how transit routing works:
All public ipv4 transit networks in existence use a routing protocol called BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol v4 - rfc1771). BGP is an "inter-autonomous system" routing protocol. That means, as a whole, it has no network awareness of individual routers, links, specific static addresses or locations. Essentially, all it knows is that a set of ip networks comprise an Automous System (labeled via an ARIN/RIPE/APNIC assigned Autonomous System Number). When a bgp router in one AS has an established bgp session with a router in a different AS, it tells the other router all the foreign ASNs that the network is willing to take traffic for and prepends its own ASN to the front of the list. The same is done for networks that originate within the local AS (i.e. the ASN is appended to "nothing" and is thus respresents the final destination AS) [there is also an origin ASN field, but ignoring that for the sake of simplicity]. This list is known as a bgp path. Thus, to find a route(s) to any accessible ipv4 address, a bgp router need only look at all the paths that contain the destination ASN, and the shortest path is generally the best route (although certainly not always). The actual job of routing packets is handled on a per-AS basis; i.e. each network is responsible for knowing, internally, how best to move packets to all the AS' that are connected to it.
You will note, however, that the core problem you describe continues to exist in this model, simply not on a per-router basis. If AS999 sends a path such as "9999 701" to all neighboring ASes, they'll believe that a viable route for traffic destined to AS701 is via AS9999, which, given a large major network, could be extremely distruptive.
However, in reality, this has not been a grave concern for a number of yea
the problem is that when you ask if servers are not connected to the internet, they reply no, they usually mean they are segmented in someway, but still physically connected. putting a server in a vlan or disabling it from accessing certain networks does not segregate the server from other networks! as long as it is physically connected in someway to the same switch, it is a risk that can be most likely compromised.
This has my vote as the best comment ever made on /.
It's people, not political parties that need to protect freedom - political parties only protect the power of that party - whichever it is.
I can never decide what sig to wear... so I don't go out much.
Remember before posting a reply about some theft or fraud - we allready have names for those crimes, so you'll need to come up with some reason as to why the incident was a terrorist act, so you'll need more than a graph of incidents that have nothing at all to do with terrorism like the one linked above.
A question I would pose in response to the article is: Are those who pushed the Patriot Act who are the source of the stuff in the article credible? The emotive name and the fact that it was shoved through without those who had to vote on it being allowed to read it implies that they are not.
The problem with this way of thinking, though, is that most ordinary people believe that terrorism is not an act of God, and that it is, in some way, a preventable issue.
I've always told people that terrorism is unpreventable. Anyone who randomly decides to give up his life to take others can and will do it. Anyone could spontaneously convert to Radical Islam, Fundie Christian, or heck even radical Hinduism and then go out and fill up a can of gasoline and set it off on the closest public gathering of people they deem to be unbelievers.
The reason why we don't see this is on a daily basis (at least in the states) is that most people (even deaply religious people) tend to not have desires to go out of their way to do this. Only when you piss someone off or put them in a situation favorable to finding salvation through self termination (ie they have nothing else to loose and everything to gain) will they go and do this.
I'm not saying you shouldn't punish people for wrong doings and not take preventive measures, but it is just silly to think that you can stop people from going over the edge at all times during the day. The only way to defeat terrorism is to downplay it and almost ignore it. If terrorism doesn't get headlines and everyone accepts that it is just another way to die but is highly unlikley in terms of ways to die and moves on with the life, the sooner people will stop using terror as a means of political agenda tool.
After all, that is the whole point of terror.
Besides you are more likley to be shot and murdered for your money than for your religion.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
..I feel discouraged that MS only sent "a guy from Microsoft's ISA team". I mean, they could have at least sent a PCI team guy! I'm not requesting an AGP or E-PCI team guy! For crying out loud, even a VESA or EISA would do but ISA!? I bet he's 8bit even... tsk tsk tsk...
But if the terrorists take out the Internet, we won't be able to shop at Amazon and eBay! And the president has told us to keep shopping because if we don't keep shopping, the terrorists win!
I demand that we take steps to defend this vital piece of national infrastructure before the anti-consumerist enemies of freedom interfere with our fundamental democratic right to buy junk online and have it in our hands the next day without even leaving the house. What could be more basic to our way of life than that?
Also, I want my porn and my pirated MP3s and that funny video where the cute kitten does that wacky thing. If I can't have those, the terrorists have definitely won.
Enough talk about evil cyberterrorists... let's blow some shit up. :)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The CIA identified cyberterrorism as the next breed of terrorism. As a result, the company I worked for, invested a crapload of money into a super secure co-location facility. It was designed to basically withstand any means of forced entry, and the thumb print scanners also checked for a pulse. How wrong we were though...
Just so everyone knows where I am coming from, I define cyber terrorism as: Cyber terrorism is a premeditated, politically motivated criminal act by sub-national groups or clandestine agents against information and computer systems, computer programs, and data that result in physical violence where the intended purpose is to create fear in non-combatant targets. This means that just defacing a website is not cyber terrorism, nor is shutting off the lights unless someone is physically injured. Any other definition enlarges computer crime in the name of terrorism. We need to stay focused so we do not simple turn everyone or every computer incident into a terrorist attack. There are several primary areas of concern for cyber terrorism. These are: 1. The ability to gather intelligence on potential targets by breaking into systems. This includes family histories, medical conditions, credit, travel schedules, political and religious affiliations, and even enough information to assume a person's identity. Ramzi Tousef was the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He came to the US as Ramzi and left on a different passport as Abdel Basit. Target intelligence is no small matter in skilled hands with significant resources. 2. Modify existing electronic records or databases that have a direct outcome such as a high profile target's blood type before a major operation, vaccination or allergy histories, and the like. This also includes the removal of people on airport watch lists before a hijacking. 3. Much of our economic infrastructure is controlled by SCADA systems. This includes our railroads, water treatment facilities, electrical generation and distribution, as well as simple traffic systems. The man power needed to run these facilities would be enormous without SCADA systems as control of these facilities involve great geographic distances. Breaches of SCADA systems have huge secondary ramifications to health and safety. Believe what you like about all the hype about cyber terrorism. The real issue is implementing protective measures against these types of attacks and protecting people from harm. Let's stop the drumbeat about cyber terrorism and start doing something about securing our information infrastructures. With Kind Regards, Dr. Andrew M. Colarik, AndrewColarik.com
Well yes, it will happen, but only in the same sense that hurricanes will happen. You have to not build in a 100% dependence on anything ... communications infrastructure, Internet, or whatever. Then it will happen, it will pass, and things will be put back together again. Just like hurricanes, and like the power cut in the NorthEast.
In 1999, two senior Chinese colonels published a book called Unrestricted Warfare. It advocated using non-kinetic means to assault a world power (USA) who's military superiority was the tops. They advocated something called Lawfare, tying the USA up through legal means, the UN, etc. They advocated cyber warfare as a method for damaging critical infrastructure (critical infrastructure is often stupidly connected to the internet - some business type decides he needs a metric on something viewable over the web and links directly the legacy control system which often has no security built in - geniuses). They also advocated war by proxy - paying someone to start something with the USA and they mention Bin Laden directly.
The translated version used to be available on the web, I don't know if it is any longer.
You are entirely correct that such choices are not made rationally.
But perhaps we can make more balanced choices if we are actually informed of all the costs of each option.
For example, by putting an amount into homeland security, we have less ability to accomplish other goals, such as medical research which can save lives. In other words, if the money for security went to medical research or making flu vaccines, undoubtedly more people's lives would be saved over 5-10 years. Fundamentally, security investment are nonproductive in the direct sense, similar to the armed forces. It is necessary to protect people and an existing system. But any choice will have a cost.
http://www.hcra.harvard.edu/about.html
Center Director of Risk Communication David Ropeik and George Gray are authors of "RISK, A Practical Guide for Deciding What's Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around Us."
A terrific read. Bursted many of my preconceptions about risky choices when I read it.
One point we DO know, invading Iraq has costed 2000+ American lives and xxx(classified) # of civilian lives i Iraq so far. HOW MANY HAS IT SAVED?
Remember that 911 costed us ~2700 lives. We have passed that point quite a ways back in terms of death toll.
The last comment is right on, and in fact the Clipper project illustrates quite well that neither party can be trusted. The Clipper chip was actually a Bush I administration project -- initiated and developed before Clinton came into office. It was pretty much a done-deal, and it was announced a few months after Clinton took office. So it was developed by one party, it could have been stopped or at least questioned somewhat by the other party, and both parties pushed it forward.
And the scariest part of it all is that the "voice of reason" at the time was actually John Ashcroft. Yikes.
Requirements:
1. It must be easy for them to understand.
2. It must be something they will follow (lots of pictures), and not a white paper.
3. It must be colorful
4. It must have a goal of educating the user and not taking their money.
5. I prefer it be securemypc.com rather than joe.blog.com/files/02/05/security101.htm
I have seen guides with this in mind but they are mostly all crap. The task is not hard and I see people clearly explain it over and over to people on web boards but I have yet to see a _good_ website where I can just say to them "go here http:"
Certianly if people can spend billions of dollars and have hundreds of orginizations to clean up the damage these systems cause than someone can write a simple to follow guide for the end users that do care...right?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
The Nightmare Worm will not be fast. It will have as its first priority not being found. It secondly will be self-updating and thirdly cross-platform.
:)
Not being found is impossible, but if kept as a goal it would go a long way towards improving the survivability and reach of the worm. By staying hidden the worm would delay analysis and would promote its chances of being 'out there' somewhere forever. It should colaborate with its peers to avoid attacking a host or network more than once within a large period of time, like six months. It should use kernel modules on whatever platform it's on to hide itself. It should delay installing itself on a harddrive when it can help it (in a honeypot, all bets are off) and only do so when the likelyhood of detection is sufficiently low. It can use persistent storage for data, but should keep it obfuscated and only use disk space that appears free to the system. The worm should not use up more than a 'background noise' level of resources. It should not use up all the CPU, RAM, disk space or bandwidth. It should not hide processes, but should insert itself into existing processes so that hidden process detection won't find it. It should tunnel its worm activity over existing sanctioned and necessary protocols like ICMP, using stegonagraphy and similiar obfuscation methods. It should piggyback its communications on legitimate traffic whenever possible, never adding more than a few percent of overhead. The worm would also need to have counter-measures for all the popular detection mechanisms, and even some of the unpopular ones. It should have exploits for anti-spyware systems, Tripwire, etc, to allow those programs to keep running and generating reports, even having them 'find' things now and then that aren't the worm, to keep from raising the suspicions of the host computer's admins. If the worm were REALLY clever, it could hoist itself into a supervisor role on machines with hardware support for virtualization. It would have to find a way to exploit the existing supervisor, and then convince that supervisor that it still has control of the machine. This is hypothetical, but still...
It should keep a list of peers with trust levels, and should accept patches to itself from sufficiently trusted peers. This peer-based patching system would probably be the same system which allows the worm to share knowledge about already infected and blacklisted computers with itself and the update system would aid the worm in covering its tracks by allowing the author to patch any vulnerabilities in the worm itself. It would also allow the worm to learn about new platforms, new vulnerabilities, and to strengthen itself. This would also allow the worm to reveal as little of its plan as possible at a time. Each instance would contain just enough of itself to maintain control of its host, stay hidden, and to participate in the worm net.
The cross-platform aspect is helpful for improving spreading. A bunch of windows machines are probably going to be behind some kind of unix-like network infrastructure. If the worm could only attack and infect one or the other, it would never make it to the chewy center of the tootsie pop.
With this worm in place it would be possible to push updates out to the worm peers which perform all the terrible Doom's Day actions speculated of elsewhere in this forum. Wipe drives, wipe BIOSes, drive all the devices as hard as possible in hopes of burning something out. But more importantly, if the worm stayed mostly hidden for 10 years and was infecting backups for that whole time, there's a good chance that entire datacenters would have to be rebuilt (including replacing zero'd BIOSes) from the OS up.
But I think there are even worse things that the worm could do, like providing its owners with all the interesting secrets on the host machines or modifying important data.
When such a worm is developed, then the internet will have the best chance of becoming self-aware.
Take a small country , lets say the one I live in Sweden. Attack that one - Did it work? Now start discussing about taking it out on the US
Something getting repeated in comments and in the posted discussion is the idea that terrorists won't want to disrupt the communications network because they want everybody to see an hear their deeds and become terrified.
The reality is, however, that although the net might not be as redundant as we'd like to think, it is redundant enough that word would spread. Radio and television would also spread the news.
The benefit of disrupting communications (as long as it's not total disruption, which to be honest, I don't think is possible) is that it makes all of the other things failing seem more systemic. How many of us tried to contact a relative or co-worker in NYC on 9/11. There was the double-whammy of knowing that all of those people were dying, and your friend might be one of them but you can't find out because you can't reach them. Imagine that magnified by not being able to reach the city or the region.
The best method to inflict terror is to do something that scares people. And an effective attack on any of our infrastructures will do that. Certainly, collapsing buildings is more frightening to us than taking down the net; but don't kid yourself, people have a vague idea of how dependent we are on it now. Every segment of our critical infrastructure uses it in some important fashion. Perhaps they should not; but they do. It would be an effective attack vector for them.
As far as the arguments about "return on effort", etc. That's the sort of analysis a military or government would do. In a conflict in which terrorists will blow themselves up in hotel lobbies, I don't think it's a valid benchmark for what they will and won't do.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
How did you get a "total infection" within 10 minutes from this?
From your link: "Unfortunately we did not begin capture until approximately 16 hours after the first reports of the worm."
Sounds a lot longer than 10 minutes to me.
And honestly, I wasn't going to post this but I felt it needed to be pointed out. I totally understand your point (and agree w/ you, btw) but being alarmist about it isn't going to help. The slammer worm moved fast -- but not nearly as fast as you claim.
"The sooner we quit believing that one party or another cares about the voters, the sooner we have a chance to preserve the dwindling amount of it we have left."
there, i corrected it for you. just a minor typo.
The sooner we quit believing that one party or another is interested in freedom, the sooner we have a chance to preserve the dwindling amount of it we have left.
I agree in principle - but it's also kind of unproductive to take the 'long view' and always claim precedent for everything bad going on right now. We don't have time machines, we can't change history- you have to focus on the present and the people who are perpetrating bad things right now. As far as two party politics go, if the elected official does bad enough, then you vote them out, you don't play games with trying to predict the future with what the opposing candidate might do, you focus on punishing the people in office right now who are screwing up right now. If you keep punishing both parties that way long enough, if every official is only there for one term, maybe they'll learn better eventually, or a third party will pop up.
The other thing is the more examples from history you point out, the further back you go, the more someone is going to think that it all turned out mostly all right so there's nothing to get excited about (even though the reason things did turn out all right back then was because people did get excited and took up arms and fixed it).
A recent level-1 peer-to-peer dispute left tens of millions of people unable to access an equally large number of Internet sites. If the big boys at level-1 don't get along, they can (and have recently) disconnected huge areas of the Internet. Redundancy is extremely expensive and the Internet is designed to generate revenue, not consume it.
Could the Internet be brought down by an attack? The networked designed by Darpa to withstand a nuclear war was brought down in 1988 by the infamous Internet worm created by the great Robert Tappan Morris (now an associate professor at MIT). Robert Morris was no cyber-terrorist. He had but the best and most benign intentions: to measure the size of the Internet. Yet he accidentally brought much of it down.
Only the ignorant believe that the Internet is inherently stable due to redundancies. Neither the backbone nor the side roads have a great deal of redundancies built in them. A few mid to large size companies use two level-3 ISPs all of which probably connect to the same level-2 ISP. That's hardly redundancy.
How many times have you lost cable/dsl? How many times has a web-site connection timed out for you (not due to the web-server being down)? How often due you experience lag in fps games?
Read "Freakonomics" by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner. They have the cojones to *start* the book by claiming, and supporting their claim, that if you look at the rise in teen violence in the '70's and '80's you'll see that it peaked 17 years after widespread legalization of abortion and then began to drop rapidly.
I don't LIKE thinking that we now tend to cull the dangerous part of society, but it's pretty hard to argue with their thesis.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
"Staying technologically superior is also a form of corporate welfare. ... We could have done just as much damage dropping $10 million worth of diesel fuel and nitrate in 50 gallon drums from cargo planes."
Get a clue about warfare before you speak. I detest corporate welfare as much as anyone, and I hold a very low opinion of the current administration, but precision guided munitions are NOT about corporate welfare.
The ability to put munitions exactly on a target is an enormous advance. Taking out a specific military target now requires only one or two rounds. The size of the explosive can also be greatly reduced, and is sometimes even eliminated -- they have actually used precision guided concrete 'bombs' to take out targets in sensitive or populated areas. Precision munitions are not about "how many people they can accurately kill", but about how few non-targeted people and our soldiers get killed while accurately taking out a target. 'Collateral damage' is now a newsworthy exception instead of a usual occurrence.
In contrast, old-style 'cheap' bombing was far from cheap, even when the costs of the precision guidance systems are counted. What is now done with a single 500# precision-guided bomb used to take multiple plane-loads of 2000# bombs, and even then have a lower probability of actually destroying the target. More weapons have to be made, transported and flown to the target (area), more flyers are put at risk, more collateral damage is done, and more civilians are killed.
The result of what you are saying is that you would rather spend a lot more money and kill a lot more civilians just to avoid paying a profit to a few corporations. Oh, yes, and they would make a profit anyway making the old dumb bombs.
Moving on to your claim that terrorism is somehow connected to policy; this is absurd. Terrorists are hate-mongers, pure and simple, and they just use the current political situation as an excuse. If you change what they profess to hate today, they'll find something else to hate tomorrow.
If terrorism was actually about policy, they'd attack institutions and infrastructure that implemented the policy. Refer to the French Resistance in WWII; they attacked things to make life inconvenient to the occupying Axis forces and administrators, not civilians (and it was all plenty brutal). In contrast, these terrorists just attack civilians in a way that will make news. Do you actually think that sending suicide bombers to a wedding at a nice hotel in Jordan and killing children and the parents of the married couple actually has any real connection with a POLICY?
Remember, no one is suppose to mention that the U.S. is an empire, it reminds us that we do not really believe in freedom.
A blog about stuff.
Correct. However, there isn't a snowball's chance in Hell of the Powers That Be moving to actually eliminate it.
What caused Columbine? Bullying. Columbine was the natural result of millions of jocks and other "cool kids" picking on millions of nerds, gamers, effeminate males and other "nerds" and "faggots", every day, year after year, generation after generation. Sooner or later, it was inevitable that at least one of those kids was going to crack, and start shooting at anything that even vaguely looks like a bully.
And that's what happened at Columbine.
Of course, America being America, instead of cracking down on the bullies who literally drove the Columbine killers to the breaking point, they cracked down on the "nerds" instead. It's a wonder we haven't had a "Columbine" every year.
This, of course, is in the fine American tradition of "blaming the victim". It's very much like how, if you harass or abuse someone in school, nothing usually happens to you, but God help you if you "tattle" (read: try to have those in power stop the abuse).
It's also similar to the classic "But Your Honor, dressed like that? She was ASKING to be raped."
This sort of "blame the victim" crap is endemic to America, and possibly other Western cultures as well (though I can only speak for my experiences, which happened in the bad ol' US of A).
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
so people who both believe and do not believe in credibility can... uhhh... identify with it.
Don't try time this is at light home, but.
[...]
6. Joe must still be able to connect to the Internet afterwards.
Some problems are easy to get when someone else uses a backhoe. Some are easy to solve when you use one.
I have yet to see a _good_ website where I can just say to them "go here http:"
More seriously, check out Our Tax Dollars At Work. Unfortunately, it's targeted to users in a Domain environment, not standalone home machines. Still, it's probably a better starting point than many.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
All public ipv4 transit networks in existence use a routing protocol called BGP4 (Border Gateway Protocol v4 - rfc1771)
In my old geazer defense, I studied networking shortly after that RFC was written. Most of the characteristics you describe appear to have been introduced as new features in BGP-4. My networking book devotes a whopping two pages to BGP. At any rate, it appears BGP-4 solves the problem being discussed.
Thanks for the info!