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Crackers Cause Pentagon to Put Computers Offline
Anarchysoft writes "As many as 1500 Pentagon computers were brought offline on Wednesday in response to a cyber attack. Defense Secretary Robert Gates reported of the fallout both that the attack had 'no adverse impact on department operations' and that 'there will be some administrative disruptions and personal inconveniences.' When asked whether his own e-mail had been compromised, Gates responded, 'I don't do e-mail. I'm a very low-tech person.'"
Do we really need a damn USA tag? Seriously, this is a US-centric site, so naturally more stories are going to come from the US. I don't see any EU, UK, AU, etc tags.
on his VCR must get on his nerves. Does anyone really believe that he is being honest about his lack of technical aptitude? I believe that about as much as I believe that George Bush didn't know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni. Gates may or may not do email, but nobody will successfully subpoena any of it. He is jerking you off, folks.
Shouldn't it be the other way around?
There's nothing of substance in the article.
My guess is this was related to the MPACK issue, but us nerds knew about that over the geekend.
In 1914 General Joffre, commander of the French forces, refused to use the telephone, claiming he "didn't understand the mechanism." Therefore he spent hours driving back and forth to the British army headquarters in the middle of a desperate campaign to stop the Germans. It is believed that he feared his words being recorded on the other end without his knowledge.
What could someone like that gain from personally using email?
Actually, I wonder how many CEOs use email.
He seemed perfectly fine letting people talk about secret military matters on their insecured wireless crackberries.
About CEOs, based on rumors and wild speculation, I've heard that Michael Dell does indeed use email, and does it pretty much directly. This is why he has to change email addresses pretty frequently, whenever it becomes known to the wider world and they start sending him hatemail / penis enlargement ads / technical support questions.
In contrast, some other CEOs have catchy, widely-published email addresses, and I can only assume whole staffs of people to read their Inbox and sort the wheat from the chaff. Sam Palmisano (CEO of IBM) used to have an address that was like "sam@ibm.com" or something like that. I thought it was kinda cool, but then realized that anyone sending an email there, thinking a CEO is actually going to read it, is on as much crack as someone who writes to their Senator and doesn't realize that it's going to be read and filed by some unpaid summer intern.
Anyway, although I've never gotten to use them, most of the big corporate email suites (Exchange, Notes, etc.) have features that allow for 'delegation' of people's email boxes to secretaries and assistants. So an executive can have their own address but route all the mail coming into it to an assistant, who can sort through and pass stuff along appropriately. And that's for executives that do any of their own email.
Doubtless, at the very high end of the power ladder, there are people whose time is just so valuable that it's wasteful to ever have them sitting and typing at a keyboard -- it's cheaper to have a well-paid executive assistant actually read, summarize, note the desired response to, draft, and present for approval the responses to, all incoming messages. Whether most CEOs do that I don't know (I suspect not too many, anymore), but I bet that a lot of high-ranking government officials do it that way.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Perl script, default passwords and a modem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I am 100% sure that they do separate the classified info (i.e secret and above) from the normal everyday workings. Whether there is a physical disconnect or hardware encryption tunneled in nonclassified lines, I don't know.
This story is exactly why most governments don't particularly want an internet where upload bandwidth is the same as download and there's a reasonable possibility for anonymity. "Cracker" stories like this start appearing more frequently with the same amount of non-information below the headline. As another post mentions, there are few if any facts.
The U.S. government is preparing to legislate the end of the Internet as a democratizing force by turning it into a content delivery mechnanism. But they can't legislate without preparing public opinion. My bet is TPM is sold as a safety feature to protect us from "cracker stories" like this. After all, if you aren't a bad guy then it should be no problem right?
Even if I'm dead wrong, (and I might be) recent political history is full of examples where news events is at worst fabricated, at best spun to justify all kind of crazy agendas.
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It's not bullshit at all--the telegraph is a poor medium for conducting real-time debates. Joffre couldn't order the British, he had to convince them, and for that he needed to argue back and forth. That required telephone or face-to-face communications.
I'm getting this information from Barbara Tuchmann's 'The Guns of August.' Pick it up, it's a good read and makes World War I make sense, which no amount of schooling I recieved could do.