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US Unable To Win a Cyber War
An anonymous reader writes "The inability to deflect even a simulated cyber attack or mitigate its effects shown in an exercise that took place some six days ago at Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel doesn't bode well for the US. Mike McConnell, the former Director of National Intelligence, said to the US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee yesterday that if the US got involved in a cyber war at this moment, they would surely lose. 'We're the most vulnerable. We're the most connected. We have the most to lose,' he stated. Three years ago, McConnell referred to cybersecurity as the 'soft underbelly of this country' and it's clear that he thinks things haven't changed much since then."
If you watched the broadcast of this exercise on CNN, you heard many people arguing for things that the government just can't do such as ordering telcos to disable all smartphones, suspending rights, and even nationalizing the power companies.
They spent so much time being told by the simulated AG what they couldn't do, they didn't have time left to discuss what they could do.
a.k.a. All your base are belong to us.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Tell us something we don't know. When script kiddies can invade government networks, I'd say that we are pretty much screwed if an all-out digital conflict were to happen.
Living With a Nerd
More government intervention and monitoring of the Internet, to be outsourced to 3rd party vendors which are politically connected?
Nah, couldn't happen.
Given the completely ignorant approach the Legislative and Judiciary powers in the United States of Jeebus have taken to the Internet, I am not surprised that the Executive power is also doing it wrong.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
Pretext to OpenID and government surveillance.
To me, all that pony show was six days ago was a mock news and propaganda freak show. It just showed that congressional leadership and suit monkeys couldn't deal with the situation, it didn't say anything about whether our infrastructure or the closet tech experts in charge of it could effectively deal with it.
I also might add, "GNN" did a pretty poor job, too. I didn't catch all of it, but the little I did, it also showed me that there's also an inability on the news reporting front, too.
Luckily, I've setup my server farm in my old bomb shelter.
America has plenty of hackers that could wreck havoc other countries' computer systems. The Government just isn't employing most of them for various reasons
US Air Force: Hey, I'm logging out for awhile. If someone logs in any time soon, it is a Chinese hacker trying to start WWIII.
US Air Force is away.
US Air Force: DISREGARD THAT.... I SERK DICKS!!! KEKEKEKE LAUNCH ALL NUKEZ!!!!
All this proves is that the moronic politcal machine has no idea how to conduct real world I.T. tests
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Why are things like power plants, banks, or telcos directly connected to the internet? You'd think they could afford a completely separate network.
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The US Federal Government is unable to win a cyber war.
The nation's private infrastructure has been defending itself for decades now, and knows what it's doing.
The headline should really read: "Overseas hacker's computers unable to defeat incoming U.S. nukes."
That would be much more accurate, if we are going to talk about WAR.
A cyber war is an attack of things trying to leech information from systems illictly, right? Well, we need to change the way we use to combat it. We need to have web routers for personal use that forbid traffic inbound except as reply to outbound packets, by having the routers have a connection log, blocking any connections that do not truely exist. We need a new http server, one that only sends the appropriate files, and don't allow the programs it runs to edit any files except those it has been authorized to edit, we need mail servers to have a hyper-tough encryption, say 2048-bit encryption of some sort. We have the capibility of all this, we just need to utilize. Cyber Insecurity is caused only by carelessness.
If there was an actual cyber war, we would respond with real war.
We're far and away the best at that.
Random attacks showing the ineptitude of aren't a cyber war. When someone starts launching missles and redirecting our navy clear a path for an attack, then it'll be a cyber war.
When some schlubs steal buckets of personal data, mess with the power grid, or disrupt internet traffic it's just another day in the U S of A.
There once was a time when we had the best, cutting edge people in the security biz. Yes, this was a long time ago, when we had most of the technology too.
Then they passed various laws, which had good intentions. But the negative side effects killed any curiousity that new students had in exploring this field. Businesses helped insure this death of talent, by threatening certain schools by not hiring students who took classes that the Businesses found threatening.
One could see the results a mile off. We have a whole generation who is ignorant and unprepared to fight such a war. Many of the more incompetent of them are even under the delusion that they are really hot stuff. But incompetent people are blind to their own incompetence, while the bad guys have free reign to test their skills every day.
If you want a chance at some hope to defend this nation, you need to free the students to explore and learn. Until that happens, yoo'll always be owned by the bad guys. There's not a chance in the world of this happening yet though. The entire rotten system has to come crashing down first. The good news is that with the $700 Trillion ponzi scheme of derivatives, this is about to happen via the Global Financial Crisis.
That "excercise" was conducted by a bunch of former Bush officials and other neocons. It wasn't a test of our cyber security, it was a propaganda tool designed to embarass the Obama administration and urge a further erosion of our civil liberties.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
They didn't know that those things couldn't be done. Would you rather they found out during an exercise, or in a real emergency? Remember, these are not technical people.
Best Slashdot Co
I wonder how much of this new fear has to do with revving up support for ACTA/etc.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I think their problem was using GNN as their source for up to date information. Anyone relying on GNN for their news will not make it through...well.. anything... *cough*
you know you can fry stuff putting things into things that dont like the things you put into it...
Yes, we would lose as this country continues to be wrapped up in Gov. red tape. On the flip side if we experienced a serious cyber outage all it would take is to rally the troops from Blackhat/Defcon etc..., put aside that they don't hold clearance and smoke pot and let them do what they do BEST. Don't think for once the US is incapable of winning this "battle" what impedes us is we spend more time fighting bureaucracy then we do fighting the war.
Bruce Willis and Justin Long in a good movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_Free_or_Die_Hard
Whoever wrote the script must have done some research to make it look somewhat real.
Damn slashdot.
Random attacks showing the ineptitude of <random government-related place/people>...
And for good measure: ...redirecting our navy to clear a path for an attack.
Attack them now! Before it's too late!
This is nothing but propaganda.
The term cyber-war is a dumbed down and meaningless term, just likes "series-of-tubes internet" to scare people, and spread ignorance about the topic of security.
All of us that have been gainfully employed for being able to actually work in IT would become modern day partisans in any such event. It would be a rare opportunity to do our worst to other people's systems with the full knowledge of what has unintentionally brought us pain for years. That said, unlike common partisans we do think for ourselves. Many of us would need to be convinced that we were indeed on the side of what we consider good before we took an offensive approach.
AFAIK very few IT workers have decided that they needed to be part of any cyber warfare that could have coincided with the Iraq or Afganistan wars.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
There simply aren't enough Microsoft admins to manage the threat. We need a job corps project for MCSEs! This will keep us safe from Chinese haxorz.
Damping absorbs vibrations. Dampening is caused by moisture.
In a real cyber war, the international network chokepoints would be cut (probably brought down by the DDOS load) and the Internet as we know it would cease to be. You can't even guess what that would look like.
As soon as we upgrade our ability to win a cyber war, people will be out on the streets protesting the de-arming of computers.
Too much of our "national cyber security" policy does seem to be FUDged together by people who don't know what they're talking about.
For the same reason we can't win a space war, we have the most to lose. The more systems you have dependent on an asset, the more vulnerable you become in that asset.
Note however, that doesn't mean you are in a weaker position, an asset is still an asset.
Convenience isn't just convenient, it is time saved you can use to do other things. We just need to start waking up to what is a security risk and what isn't. What we need to protect and what we don't and finally drills on what to do if the primary system fails.
We are BOFH. You want Mutual Assured Destruction? We make the USAF look like wusses.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
If an attack was serious enough, we could just start disengaging connections to outside the US, then start dealing with the aspects that were attacking from inside the borders. This is probably mostly government propaganda to make the US look weaker than it really is.
If you're captured by the enemy, there are just three pieces of information you are compelled to divulge: Age, Sex, and Location.
Bow-ties are cool.
I wrote this to The Atlantic, which is a "think piece" magazine read by some decision makers in Washington.
After seeing that show, I was struck by the cluelessness of the panelists. I don't expect them to understand how networks really work, but they didn't even understand the organizations involved. Key organizations in a crisis like that would be the North American Network Operators Group and the North American Electric Reliability Council, along with the US Computer Emergency Response Team. The participants didn't know that, and they didn't have staffers to tell them.
The panelists were obsessing over whether they had enough authority to do something, while totally lacking any idea of what to do.
There are a few reasonable steps they could have taken at their level.
Having taken the initial steps, the next priority is bringing the electrical grid back up. If substations were damaged, it may be necessary to move some very large transformers around, and possibly to import them from other countries. Military assets (i.e. big transport aircraft) should be made available to help with that.
In parallel with this, the intelligence community and DoD can work on who's behind the attack. But that's not going to be dealt with in the first hours. Don't obsess on hitting back.
The US has been and will be stuck back in WWII thinking until it's too late. When you invest in war ships, tanks and fighter planes you have something "show" people. It's pretty hard to demonstrate what you got for the money when it comes to the security of intangible things. The installation of a firewall just doesn't make one go "oooh and ahhh" like the vaporized city and mushroom cloud from a 10 mega-ton ICBM. Even a security fence and a camera or two around a municipal water supply isn't very "impressive" compared to the demonstration of raw power an F-22 can unleash.
Worse still is when people do play "tickle-tickle" with our soft underbelly the response tends to be blowing up FedEx packages, taking off our shoes, having dogs sniff our crotch, and groping pregnant ladies.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
I'm guessing that there are many people in power that want an excuse to seperate the www and make seperate WAN'S. Seems like nobody is investing in secure networking for the masses for a reason... THEY WANT CONTROL BACK
Frankly, I feel the US is more prepared than most countries. Unfortunately, that still doesn't quite cut it.
I think the threat of indefensible counter-attack is going to make any government think twice about a full-on cyber-attack, taking the same role nuclear retaliation did during the Cold War.
- Despite popular opinion, I am not perfect.
Heh, I kinda hope ACTA triggers a cyberwar, against all the governments that backed it.
Avoid an digital communications war ("cyber"? There are no cybernetics involved). Don't connect government machines to public networks, and don't rely on public networks for communication.
How in the hell do Commerce, Science and Transportation concerns all belong on the same US Senate committee?!!
>"exercise that took place some six days ago at Washington's Mandarin Oriental Hotel"
Bullshit was it an exercise. It was a staged marketing promotion, nothing else.
All these FUD mongering stories are freaking me out and affecting my patience.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
Tell me when someone, anyone, actually is a winner? War is a loose loose situation.
Live free or die hard!
... is not to play.
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
This entire situation is designed to help coerce people and legislators into supporting further restrictions on internet freedom and more - it's entirely apparent.
The other thing that should be apparent is that our intelligence services and military aren't stupid. They've been recruiting people with skills for years.
We're not unprepared; where we stand against Russia and CHina I don't know, but to say we're not ready just doesn't ring true to me.
I agree with Lessig and others about a "cyber 9/11" being on the horizon, and government already having the policies they want but will never get without an attack..... http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-4631871144083884704&hl=en
Unfortunately for the U.S., the problem started decades ago. The downfall began when the corporations convinced politicians to make stronger and stronger laws to punish those who hack their system or product. This led to the idea that instead of fixing any security issues, it was easier and cheaper to try to punish those who hacked. Fast forward to today, and now theres the more laws, EUA's, DMCA's, etc.
If you discover exploits and try to go public with it. The first thing the targeted company might try to do to squash the "exploit" is either litigate or file criminal charges.
I'm not saying that there shouldn't be laws against hacking into systems, but the current environment doesn't bode well for making these system any more secure. It would be nice if there was some kind of "whistle blower" protection for those who discover exploits and maybe a company or government agency that you could disclose these exploits to in order to receive this protection.
Maybe there could be laws inacted that require a company to fix the exploit within a certain amount of time once it has been reported or something. If not they could either be fined or held accountable if any sensitive data is breached. Not sure, but something needs to be changed.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
While watching parts of this it became obvious that this was a scripted show and had no basis in reality. They had certain talking points that they wanted to get out and test on the American public, this was the show in which they set it up to do it. It was unbelievably stupid and showed incompetence of a highest order.
Obama should address this scenario and flat out bitch slap them for using this FUD to float trial balloons to further erode our constitution.
Slashdot as usual is a little bit behind the times... this "Cyber-Shockwave" wargame was recorded by CNN with Wolf Blitzer hosting, and broadcast repeatedly on CNN last weekend. Would been nice if we could tell some of the trolls here to go watch TV and come back when they were better informed.
The US has been unable to win any war in the last decade if not longer. This is just another manufactured bad guy to rally the sheeple against.
To the OP, umm, no.
Calls AT&T, whoever owns MAE East, etc. "This is the President of the United States. Can you shut down this, this, and this? Txbie."
From the viewpoint of a few dudes sitting at a cyber security dashboard app, yeah, it looks bad. From the point of view of someone who can mobilize a thousand people at the core of the Internet backbone, not so much.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
... is social engineering. No firewall can isolate you from human stupidity, and more accessible information about everything (that either is public, or can be obtained thru directed trojans/botnets) gives good base for such kind of approach.
OMG!! Some super virus has been unleashed on the Internet and can't be contained by firewalls, routers, or anti-virus measures! How do we stop it? They might as well game out a scenario where all door locks suddenly stop working.
"I'm not a quack, I'm a mad scientist! There's a difference." - Dr. Cockroach
A "Cyberwar" will be used as part of a campaign for a larger objective. When (not if) China chooses to "annex" Taiwan, the attack would likely go as follows:
US power plants go down because of SCADA systems attached available to anyone who finds them. Other embedded systems will get torn apart, from HVAC systems to traffic light control, paralyzing cities. This will happen all at once, both on CONUS, but on ports the US uses abroad, and in Taiwan as well. As a farewell gift, routers and such are zapped of all configuration to make it harder to reconnect and get infrastructure working, especially core wireless items, such as the infrastructure between towers. Even worse, most companies and organizations have no backup infrastructure in place so a simple dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda will cause permanent data loss. Or random corruption is done to archive records, making them unusable for criminal or civil proceedings down the line.
By the time the mess is cleaned up (and with embedded systems, there *will* be physical damage, such as safety valves jammed shut, causing BLEVEs), the Red Guard will have firmly garrisoned the island nation and will be telling the US that an attack there will result in a nuclear exchange.
Another possibility will be an attack against the Falkland Islands by Argentina. As of recently, that nation has been wanting to take British oil interests in the area, even trying to attack oil rigs. One can expect the UK to be hit by a coordinated attack on critical systems, as well as its allies. Then the next thing would be Argentina with help from Chavez (who is in dire need of a military victory against Europe and the US to bolster his credibility) will be invading the Falkland Islands. No, the islands may not be a major strategic issue, but they have a lot of oil underneath, and would love to attack the UK's oil interests and turn the oil derricks into torches.
Of course, there is Russia. America's grid goes down, and Russia pushes into Western interests without a shot being fired. Since most of Europe went "green" and ditched their national security for reliance on Russian gas, expect no help from France or Germany, as neither country wants its population to freeze to death, and both countries like their cities to have their lights on. It wouldn't even take a cyberattack to make Europe kowtow to Russia... just the threat of turning off the natural gas pipes.
Of course, the Middle East comes to mind. The one oil pipeline that Russia hasn't seized yet that goes through Georgia. Georgian computers go down, American grid suffers, Russian tanks plow into Georgia proper calling it a police action, depose the government and set up a puppet system. Combine that with a military action to grab control of the Persian Gulf, and Russia now has complete control of Europe's and America's oil supplies. Game. Point. Match. Checkmate.
The problem? A good number of American companies don't give a shit about security. Since security has no ROI, little but lip service is paid in that direction. They expect that they can hire an army of consultants to repair any breach 24/7, so don't do anything except put some random policies in place. Of course, come a military strike against American interests, these companies will be having their systems used as staging points and proxies to make it virtually impossible to find out who disabled a cooling system at a nuke plant, causing a SCRAM across all reactors and plunging the grid into a blackout.
When a "cyber attack" that is worth the name happens, the lights will go off, then the ships will sail into some country's harbor, and the troops will be moving in. It won't be done just for giggles by some foreign nation, it will be done in concert with another brutal offensive.
hihihi - this is not stupidity; it is call subversive influence; if this would have been the reality nobody would have had trumpeted it over the seas and lands so that anybody interested hears it. Its real purpose is to seed the ground for implementing the mega-system who's going to control all the internet - the baby SkyNet has been conceived.
Not all wars have a winner. Did we learn nothing from watching "Wargames" ?
So this would mean Mutually Assured Security with the only way to win at that game would be to not play?
The other link is probably meant to be this article. Video
A bevy of former top US officials were given various roles to play... The entire scenario was thought up by Michael Hayden, the former CIA Director, and the faux attack began with malware masquerading as a free March Madness application for smartphones. Once activated, it spread fast and first incapacitated cellphone networks, then landlines, the Internet, and finally - aided by mock bombs exploding in a couple of gas pipelines and power stations and a hurricane hitting the Gulf Coast - brought the entire East Coast electrical power grid to its knees. Air traffic was thrown into disorder and commerce came to a standstill.
This exercise was just a huge piece of FUD by CNN and a bunch of retired government officials all touting the need for more government in our lives.
The social engineers and manipulators are programming YOU - wake up..... This is nothing more than a ploy to gather support for the cyber security act that passed the house a few weeks ago; despite that its hugely unpopular....
If they win - we'll all need licenses to use the Internet - China doesn't even have that type of surveillance/control.
Excuse my cynicism about such reports, but at least once a year every year we hear some major government department bemoan how vulnerable the 'cyber-infrastructure' is to 'cyber attack'. Be scared! The message is clear! We simply must give some deadweight organisation a whole lot of money from the tax-funded budget, pronto, so that a whole building full of people somewhere can sit around pretending to come up with solutions for another year! Then they'll do nothing until budget time again next year, when we'll hear another yet alarming report about how vulnerable everything is and how the whole Internets is on the verge of being attacked and destroyed by (insert boogie-man-of-the-day blah blah) etc. Or worse, instead of doing nothing, they still don't solve the actual problems, but just pass bills that give government more power.
I'm not saying there aren't vulnerabilities in the infrastructure - certainly there are - but there's 'solving those problems', and then there's 'solving those problems'.
All warfare is based on deception.
Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder,and crush him.
Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Anyone that has been grep'ing server logs for the past 10 years or so knows the "cyber war" has already started. Since the late 90's bunk ingress from APNIC regions has been growing at an alarming rate. I used to wonder how the hell so many people in (seemingly) Asia had so much time to kill with all the dictionary attacks/scans. A lot of admins I know simply just drop the entire APNIC address range, but if you do biz in Asia, that's not so much of an option. The fact that the U.S. network czars are only just realizing they brought knives to the gunfight is an indication to me that the infrastructure is in for a severe corn-holing when the time comes.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
if there is a cyberattack, it will originate from a particular country, or, in the ultimate end, the real culprit will be detected even if they were based in another country.
what do you think will happen then, in the world of internet ? how will entire world react ? do you think everyone will just let it slide, despite internet being a MAJOR economic field and all the countries being interconnected through it, along with all their economic interests ?
we are not living in 19th century anymore. this is no simple shit. any country perpetrating such an 'attack' would face SERIOUS consequences and sanctions from entire world. leave aside international organizations like wto. also leave aside the fact that they will practically getting all their ips banned from cyberspace by individual countries, and therefore totally fucking up their own internet market.
dont buy this cyberwar bullshit. they are just using it as an excuse to justify internet control schemes they want to bring upon you americans. remember how terrorism was used to bring liberties-infringing 'security' measures in all aspects of life. its the same shit, repeating itself.
do NOT buy it.
Read radical news here
I can only see 2 reasons why someone in his position would make that statement.
1. Funding
2. US is a Honeypot
Now considering this statement was made in public... it kinda rules out the option which implies "please attack us we are defenseless" and thus I conclude the US is a Honeypot...
I think, in this case, a quick read on the general area from where the attack spawned, coupled with a few large EMP explosions would do the trick...
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
W, and even Obama, have ignored the issues with this. China is working hard to have an offensive against the west. But, it can not be a gun for a gun. We have advanced systems that barring their stealing more, they will not have for another 10-20 years. So, they have been hard at work figuring out how to take out our communications and spy sats. With the aide of the neo-cons who passed tax incentives for sending manufacturing to China AND disregarded that China is breaking all of the legal treaties regarding trade, we have really screwed ourselves.
The west's best chance is to bring back manufacturing. In addition, we need to re-focus an effort on securing all of the west's systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
buy more U.S.A. weapons.
Brilliant !
Yours In Ashgabat,
Kilgore T.
Remove all gateways for secured networks. No USB thumb drives allowed before entering a PC that's connected to that network. Build core images per department and bit lock every app that is redundant to the person's position. That's a good start...
Instead of bitching and bringing more media attention to our weakness why does he not form a plan and get us where we need to be? You know...that "work" thing.
Actually, ACTA is something that repressive governments want. It gives them everything they dreamed of in a way that short circuits any and all legal checks and balances, just like WIPO did:
24/7/365.25 surveillance on all people? Check.
Ability to permanently disconnect people without due process of law? Check.
A police force whose burden of being paid for is not on the government? Check.
Ability to make someone's writing and opinions disappear forever from the Internet? Check.
This is a tyrant's wet dream. Repressive governments have already signed off on it.
Isn't all that flag waving, jingoist nonesense for the jocks and the more physically aggressive types in society? Why would those marginalised to their bedrooms and basements for much of their formative years feel any obligation or urge to fight for so ethereal a concept as a nation? What is a nation but a line drawn in the sand to divide one tax paying group of people from another tax paying group of people? Aren't there more interesting things to do like watching Battlestar Gallactica or playing Bioshock 2?
Perhaps its better if no country can win a war, cyber-based or otherwise. Think of it! Peace might break out, and we could begin using the assets that have traditionally been diverted from improving life toward aggressive political ends or empire building.
I understand the perception that a strong military provides security and protection, but this seems true only in as much as it preserves power structures that seek to concentrate wealth and preserve a class system. In the long run Mutually Assured Destruction hasn't improved anything for anyone. The overall systemic effect has been to encourage militarism amongst the so-called civilized societies. The opportunity cost is an unknown. What could be done with the brain power and economic power currently devoted to bigger guns, better bombs and mechanized warfare?
All this proves is that the moronic politcal machine has no idea how to conduct real world I.T. tests
In the first half of the last millennium we had this figured out. The government didn't try to keep up with commerce or technology, there was the Law Merchant to deal with that, they had their own courts, often overseen by professionals.
It seems to have worked for a few hundred years anyway. Our governments are still trying to figure out how to react to Napster. And now they're pretending to fight a cyber war and don't even have NANOG simulated? It's a Mad Hatter's tea party with grey suits.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's the US. It'll be more like this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16/
When Russia wants to cause havoc in Europe, they just need to turn off the gas taps at their side of the border. No cyberattacks required. They did this last year and the year before. Not this year though, I suppose the fact that we are setting things up to enable us to get supplies from elsewhere has discouraged them from trying this too often.
Take away pr0n & WoW?
That won't last long...
The military has conducted dishonest wargames before, gaming the rules to prevent the Red team from achieving a politically distasteful victory. Perhaps the parties involved can learn from their loss instead of pretending it didn't happen. Of course, if the Red Team was supposed to win, in order to bolster budget requests and score political points, we're back to meaningless pantomimes.
If Mike McConnel is so concerned about cyber security, why did he leave his post 7 days into the Obama administration for a cush job in the private sector?
How many "accidental" undersea cable cuts in 2008? ...just saying...
-- Terry
The Persian Gulf only accounts for ~24% of US crude imports. While a loss, it won't stranglehold us. If all of OPEC were to cut off the U.S., it would be ~55% of our imports gone, which at that point we would likely stop exporting to Japan and others and shift the flows from Alaska back to us. OPEC, while a cartel, is not known for solidarity. Their profits would be hurt far too much for all of them to cut off the U.S. Besides, if we strategically place the U.S. Naval fleets we can cut off all the major world trade routes quite easily. From there, a couple surgical strikes on certain pipelines/supply lines and our "enemies" will be no better off than the U.S. The reason we are so "dependent" on foreign oil is not due to a lack of supply within our geopolitical borders, but rather a subtle strategic play to maintain resources in case a war like this were to occur. Why deplete our own resources during peace, leaving us dry during conflict; when we can use those of other countries, while safe guarding our own until we need to tap into the deposits.
If the US lost a "cyber war" enough to seriously damage our economic infrastructure, the world would lose.
Who imports all that stuff from China? A stalled US economy will lead to a lot of upset Chinese unemployed. Who still has the largest amount of global financial services? Care to try to cash in those stocks/bonds or "safe" US Treasury Securities when the US information infrastructure is down?
If the US real-estate bubble was enough to cause a global recession, what would happen if the entire information infrastructure of the US were taken out?
Any nation-state that thinks taking out the US will help them is stupid. Terrorism (the kind that can accept a global depression) is another story.
And it's in the name of Capitalism that Texans want to teach biblical creationism in public schools; and it's because of Capitalism that George Bush Senior said that atheists shouldn't be allowed to vote. Capitalism is also the reason USA money has "In God We Trust" printed on the bills instead of, say "In Money We Trust" at the door of every church and synagogue.
Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change.
ya right
500 of my hackers could give your nation a real ride if so ordered
AND you'd be all like where the frak are they
DON'T listen to GOVT/CORPORATE propoganda people
the fact is there actions drive more legit hackers to the users union dare i call it the united hackers if you will.
PEOPLE that dont think in terms of nations in terms of religion or race.
AND WOA they all get along how the hell is that possible.
YOUR DMCA has done far better at disarming your nations hackers then you realize and its why where live i LAUGH at you
2 days after 9/11 and your govt was at that point calling all hackers terrorist and then changed its mind and was even using my words out of context i find this who thread absolutely FUNNY
you retards cant hack your ways out of a paper box.
you had to have my help in the last cybar war with china and this time i will not give aid
YOU HEAR ME OBAMA
no more shall me and my brothers and sisters be used.
What?! This is Slashdot. Everything has a lib'rul bias, except Fox News, which is Fair and Balanced®! Why isn't there any good conservative media around?! Pout
I wholly believe a national cyber attack of this scale might be responded to with less than diplomatic measures, such as launching the big rockets. I assume that most governments assume that a large infrastructure attack of that nature could be the beginning of a physical attack, not to mention the physical damage caused by the "cyber" attack in the first place. That would be a breach of the whole MAD concept. The second anyone knows where the packets are coming from, bad things will happen.
If the DoD really wants a practical exercise, it should go after the botnets and kill them. They are exactly the sort of thing that would be used to launch a cyber attack from the inside out. Kill the botnets and they kill a huge attack vector.
Next up would be a re-design of the corporate attitude. The just push it out the door and we'll patch any security flaws later (like, you know, after we give up on shareholder value and the quarterly numbers as our sole metrics of success and quit offshoring to the cheapest labor who happens to be in the country we most fear a cyber attack from, that is).
Good luck with that BTW.
I have mod points but I can't find "-1, paranoid." The world economy is far too interdependent for any of the major players to consider a large scale attack like this. A cyber-attack on the US or Europe as described would be devastating enough to Russia and China that it's unlikely rational leaders would risk it - certainly not over something like Taiwan or Georgia. Argentina and Venezuela attacking the Falklands? yeah right. Hugo Chavez "is in dire need of a military victory against Europe and the US to bolster his credibility"?? That's the stupidest thing I've read all day. Venezuela is hardly a major military power and whatever "credibility" Chavez has rests on socialist rhetoric and cheap oil, not on military might.
Even if US somehow blocked EVERY country that is even remotely threatening, the attacks can come from within the US from the hundreds of thousands of compromised bots controlled through proxies or simply carrying out coordinated sleeper code planted in advance.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
The obvious reason the US would be attacked in a "cyber war" would be to prevent the US from attacking in a conventional war. So, there's an easy way to avoid being attacked -- don't attack anyone else.
Supposedly, the point of the UN was to end that sort of thing, anyway.
the Red Guard will have firmly garrisoned the island nation and will be telling the US that an attack there will result in a nuclear exchange.
What you fail to realize is that they will get it.
A stalled US economy has lead to a lot of upset Chinese unemployed.
One correction.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
Quick, Start the presses! We have another crisis to fund!
Man, you just had the worst trip ever.
No, now they are trying to convince Scandinavian countries that we should allow them to pull a fat pipe along the baltic sea. There is a lot of resistance from all the green parties, and if this was combined with a large "look how they use this to control everyone" group it would not go through.
Typing Google into Google.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
Why would those marginalised to their bedrooms and basements for much of their formative years feel any obligation or urge to fight for so ethereal a concept as a nation?
Cash. Lots of it.
Someone should write a network-to-RTTY audio/network driver. Then, if the internet fails, we can still network (albeit slowly) over the phone network, walkie-talkies, Ham Radio (44/8 anyone?).
Get your own free personal location tracker
So you're saying we should build robots to sniff crotches and grope pregnant women?
A stalled US economy has lead to a lot of upset Chinese unemployed.
China's unemployment rate in March 2007 was 4.1%, and as of December 2009 was 4.3%. Not much from a percentage standpoint, but with a labor force of 800 million, that still adds up to 1.6 million more unemployed.
Actually, they probably aren't directly connected, at least not in the sense of being directly addressable. I work for a large manufacturing company, and our critical plant equipment, though networked, uses private IP addresses that are not routable on the general Internet. We have private IP segments for all equipment of that nature. So for someone to attack our critical production infrastructure, they would first have to breach something else on the network, and then use that as a proxy to forward on the attack into the internal network segments. Is that possible? Of course. But does it take a lot of extra time during the attack and make early reconnaissance of the critical parts of our company difficult? Absolutely.
Now, I don't work for a bank or a nuclear power plant, so I can't guarantee they work the same way. But assuming they do, which is fairly likely, then to attack everything would be very difficult for a hacker. You can't just do an easy drive by exploit, at least not if you are trying to gain information, steal money or anything else that requires precision. Your only real option would be a crippling worm (something like the blaster worm) that causes havoc everywhere at once. And the problem with that kind of attack is that most likely your own nation's populace and corporations would be vulnerable as well (especially in the case of a zero day vulnerability). And maybe you code the virus to avoid certain IP ranges, but it wouldn't be long before someone released a copycat without the restriction.
Cyber-warfare makes for great movie scripts, but it really doesn't work well except in the cases of limited, carefully planned surgical strikes or large, indiscriminate attacks on everything running a certain OS. Doing mass attacks that only target one country and smartly take down their computers is very difficult indeed.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
You should write books and have Tom Clancy slap his name on it.
if Argentina tried to fuck with the Falklands again, even with Chavez as an ally, they would just get their asses kicked like they did in the 80s.
"The obvious reason the US would be attacked in a "cyber war" would be to prevent the US from attacking in a conventional war."
Yeah, Germany, Russia, France, England, Greece, Rome, China, Japan and just about everyone else in history attacked countries so they wouldn't attack first.
"So, there's an easy way to avoid being attacked -- don't attack anyone else."
That's worked so well in history. Gosh, why didn't I think of it?
"Supposedly, the point of the UN was to end that sort of thing, anyway."
So true. The UN is the most effective organization in the world in preventing wars. You're right. Its track record speaks for itself.
Longer translation: The Marines/Navy/Army/CIA/NSA/whatever have all those shiny new toys! I also want toys. Gimme my toys!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
The US has been fighting the war on crime, drugs, etc for 40+ years, still haven't made an impact and those things are REAL.