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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."
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.
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"
Who would we be at war with? And what would it look like? I already block Large blocks of IPs from china/russia.
Actually this is a better example http://xkcd.com/538/
just imagine in the left panel it's the goverment imagining needing all these 4 amendment violations and the right one is a sysadmin pulling out network cable from the router that connects the supposed country we would be at cyberwar with.
In short, cyberwarfare won't work for the exact same reasons that censorship won't work, there's too many people working against the attackers who can communicate too quickly and too effectively.
Quiet, you fool! Imagine if they can convince the United States government that part of its defense budget should go to increasing cyber security! We already know the DoD uses Linux and wants more. Just think what a very tiny fraction of the US Defense budget could do for security in Linux and its subsequent adoption for corporations!
And for those of you that argue the enemy will then use Linux: who cares? Bullet proof protection on both sides would prevent any attempt of an offensive from ever sparking a war. In light of recent economic ups and downs, I would argue at this point it's more important to make the corporations feel 100% safe and secure -- unlike Google in China.
My work here is dung.
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
You are exactly correct: We'll never win a Cyber War unless we build a big, shiny Robot Army.
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
Why would any of that happen???
The internet is essentially millions of walled and gated communities.
Everything that any hypothetical attacker could try is already being done by the legions of script kiddies right through to highly paid top notch programmers working for organised criminal groups.
If any hypothetical attacker from china or *scary place* wanted to launch a DDoS attack why would they write anything of their own when they can just pay for bandwidth from one of the big botnet herders?
Government entities hardly have a monopoly on hackers.
A million Sys admins the world over already deal with these problems every single day of the year.
The panelists were obsessing over whether they had enough authority to do something
"obsessing over whether they had enough authority" was no mistake - it was the whole point of this test from the very beginning. We can already see that "lack of authority" and recommending new powers be granted to the president is the main focus being driven home in the aftermath of this exercise in propaganda. The real aim of course being to garner support for enacting laws giving enough authority to do "something" about this problem of people communicating over the internet. The people behind this test are not stupid or clueless, they merely know which fear buttons to press in order to get what they want.
... 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.
They are sociopaths and psychotics and we can only hope they die of old age before the country falls headlong into a French Revolution of purges, pogroms, and random bloodletting.
What makes you think their children will be any different? There has been a trend for the ruling class in the US to function equivalently to royalty (Bush I & II, Clintons, Kennedys). I don't see why the next generation of sociopaths will be any better than the current batch.
Between government regulations and the unions you aren't going to have an opportunity to bring back manufacturing to the US.
The misunderstanding is that manufacturing ever "left" the US.
US manufacturing output reached an all-time-high of $1.6 trillion in 2007, nearly double the $811 billion in 1987.
It is true that US manufacturing jobs are on the decline, but not because we are not manufacturing, but because manufacturing productivity is rising. More machines/robots are doing the work, and where humans are involved, the US is concentrating on higher value products.
This is EXACTLY what we saw in the farm industry. In 1900, 30% of Americans worked on a farm. Today, fewer than 2% do, but the US produces more food than it did in 1900 with far fewer workers and less land.
If the (mostly) low value-add manufacturing done by China had to be done in the US, it would be done by machines, not human workers.