Slashdot Mirror
Canadian Gov't Victim of Cyberattacks
courteaudotbiz writes "Canada and all members of the U5 (United States, Germany, United Kingdom, France and New-Zealand) state that they all suffered government-directed attacks between June and September 2007. These seemed to be Chinese government sponsored attacks." It's a Google translation, so it's a bit hard to read, but it seems to be a recurring story these last few months.
I'm sure we are returning the favor and have been for decades.
It is baffling to me how these sort of Cyber-wars can go on and in the meantime countries will continue talking to eachother like nothing's the matter.
Understandably, one can draw parallels to the ongoing espionage among all countries during the 20th century. Still, this seems like the militarization of the internet, which is a civilian construct. That sets a troubling precedent.
The article tosses around the word "accused" a lot, but dosn't really point out if they have any hard evidense to back it up. Of course China is a likely suspect to "accuse" any high tech cyber-attacks of, but really, wouldn't you think any country that has a strong backbone to the internet would be capable of doing these attacks? Or am I just missing something completely?
To what extent has our critical network infrastructure retained the sort of "after-the-bomb" resilience of the original DARPAnet project? As I recall from a long ago text-book, our forbears with slide-rules and lab-coats worked out that if each node had separate links to three independent communication peers, that for most random removals of up to 90% of those nodes the remainder could still communicate. That is the design spec/philosophy that gave rise to the whole "built to survive a nuclear attack" meme.
Fast forward half a century, and everyone knows that our overall network infrastructure has nowhere near that level of redundancy and robustness, owing reasonably to that fact that most of our deployed applications don't require it. If it's not needed, why pay to build it across the board.
However, for those applications for which high-availability under outage/disaster/attack/DoS conditions is critical, have we been building appropriately? Or, as I fear, are we reliant on a small handful of satellites and long-haul backbones in support of everything else?
Is there anyone more current than I in that realm who might care to weigh in?
"Maybe it's just a term internally used by the Canadian secret services."
Or, maybe because it's being translated from a French document, it's a French abbreviation. After all, the abbreviation "EU" means completely different things to francophones and anglophones.