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US and Russia Open Talks On Limits To Cyberwar
andy1307 passes on this from the NY Times: "The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace. American and Russian officials have different interpretations of the talks so far, but the mere fact that the United States is participating represents a significant policy shift after years of rejecting Russia's overtures. Officials familiar with the talks said the Obama administration realized that more nations were developing cyberweapons and that a new approach was needed to blunt an international arms race ... While the Russians have continued to focus on treaties that may restrict weapons development, the United States is hoping to use the talks to increase international cooperation in opposing Internet crime. Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains."
Stop buying networking hardware from China, and build (or re-build) domestic suppliers of such equipment. That applies to any nation that wants to maintain security: China has been abusing its position as a dominant hardware supplier for some time now. You can have all the network security in place that money can buy, but if the Internet-facing defenses have been compromised from the manufacturer you're pretty much screwed. Too much untrustworthy modified firmware has been coming out of China lately for me to place any faith in it. Well, all right ... I suppose that if the boards are made in China but a domestic vendor supplies the firmware locally it would be okay ... but that's not how it usually works.
... and I am, but the criticism is well-deserved in this case. Not that I believe the individual manufacturers are doing this of their own accord, necessarily. But there's a lot of intrusion attempts coming out of that country, and you can bet the people behind it look at selling compromised hardware to other countries as a legitimate tool. How many of those attempts are successful because a firewall or router has hidden code in it I suppose we'll never know.
Now, some of you may think that I'm picking on Chinese vendors
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Ah, I just can't do it. Can somebody else say it?
C|N>K
Now we know why ACTA is a secret treaty...
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Or do they actually mean internet 'pirates'?
I really don't see the point in "cyber warfare" other than small-scale attacks on a certain site or ISP, a large scale plan could never fully work because any country could simply switch to basically a huge local network. Would it be hard? Yes. Is it able to be done? Yes.
Plus, other than attacks on military infrastructure, the coming diversity of OSes, CPU platforms, and networks would make attacks on civilian devices nearly impossible. You might be able to write an iPhone worm, but you wouldn't be able to write an iPhone/Android/Java/BREW worm that attacks anyone on any cell network. That worm would also not work on a PC running Windows/OS X/Linux/BSD. And the diversity in browsers make exploit-based attacks even harder. It used to be you could attack the weak IE browser and get 90% of web surfers, now you would only get slightly more than half, and you would need to attack Firefox (both 3.0 and 3.5 along with perhaps older versions), Safari, Chrome, Opera and many smaller browsers.
In short, cyber warfare is a possibility on infrastructure and is quickly approaching impossible on large amounts of devices.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
How the heck are you going to limit military use? This isn't like nukes where there are facilities to visit. I can't help but think that language is just smokescreen for the public, and this is really about cooperation on policing the internet. (Cue more secret talks ala ACTA.)
Negotiating with Russia on this, would be like America doing a treaty with UK to limit nukes; It is useless Without including China, Iran, Burma, and North Korea, then we will be missing a large part of this equation. China, Iran, and North Korea are in very active development of attack systems (as well as real systems such as new missiles, warheads, nuke subs, etc). Heck, a big part of that Chinese firewall, is not just to control their citizens, but it is also to control the outside world coming in.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I would like to see the military AND the feds restrict its purchases of critical sub-systems like this to equipment made only in trusted countries and from trust suppliers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
a Lot of kids in Russia are hackers and gov does not have the man power to stop it and some of them make money form hacking banks and can pay off local cops as well.
No more exposing our Global Warming fraud or else we will get mad you Ruskies!
Support World Peace!
CORRECTION: Support WWW Police!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXlzci1rKNM
I'd be glad if there was no money in the maufacture of landmines. Who cares about cyber-whatever?
Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains.
How much do you want to bet that "Internet criminals" in this case are people pirating music and movies? While I'm glad to see that we're finally engaging the Russians, it'd be nice if our foreign policy wasn't being directed by the RIAA and the MPAA.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
First,
Start by actually patching your machines and implementing some very basic security stuff..
You know, the kind of stuff that a script kiddie, with aspergers, searching for evidence of UFO's won't be able to get passed.
Or if you can't even manage to do that, or find out which systems you need to do it to, then when he finally get's extrodited at your request, instead of humiliating yourself further by giving him a trial and locking him up for the rest of his life. Give him a computer, let him download a few hacking tools of the internet, get him to press the GO button and write down a list of everything that gets hacked into.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
When you start hearing about "cyber" anything it's time to worry. Misappropriated prefixes are never fun.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Poopst!
It's funny how governments, especially the US government, are so worried about how cyberwarfare could affect their businesses, etc. However, they really couldn't give a rat's ass about human lives. Case in point, 100k+ Iraqi citizens killed in the war. What a horrible travesty and a crime against humanity that war was. I don't see them talking about how countries could stop attacking regular civilians, but oh, don't do anything that might destabilize our business infrastructure!
The following article is titled, "The Limits To Skepticism".
As long as the US in general relies heavily on Microsoft windows they better keep out of any real cyberwar.
HTTP/1.1 400
Does anyone think anyone will REALLY honor these treaties? I am 100% convinced that they will say, "OK, we will stop cyber warfare work" and then they will get their geeks right back to work on it in their laboratories again.
I would put ZERO confidence in any treaty of this sort.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
This will inevitably be used to introduce more government controls, and thus to limit Internet freedom for everyone...
I wouldn't be surprised if this was in part inspired by the heroic "Climategate" hacktivism (the responsibility for which I personally neither confirm nor deny at this time), liberating and bringing to light just a tiny crumb of the government's dirty laundry on just one of its power-grabbing scams...
Georgia, Ukraine, and one or more of the Baltic states have been attacked by Russia or from Russia. Are these talks going to lead to Russia promising not to do it again?
Let's count down time to introduction of internet borders. You will have to have a internet passport to connect to site in foreign countries. It will stop cyberwars, terrorists and (you guessed it) child pornography.