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Is Cyberwarfare Fiction?
An anonymous reader writes "In response to calls by Russia and the UN for a 'cyberwarfare arms limitation treaty,' this article explains that 'cyberwar' and 'cyberweapons' are fiction. The conflicts between nation states in cyberspace are nothing like warfare, and the tools hackers use are nothing like weapons. Putting 'cyber' in front of something is just a way for people to grasp technical concepts. The analogies quickly break down, and are useless when taken too far (such as a 'cyber disarmament treaty').'"
So that someone somewhere (probably higher up) can work from home.
Probably, anyways. You know how it is.
No you haven't; at least not in the sense that matters. Even if there is a country stupid enough to connect it's "off switch" to the internet, all they have to do is pull the ethernet cable and switch it on again. Even if you can break a small proportion of power stations, the rest will come on again. You are a "cybervandal" not a "cyberwarrior".
The real serious cyberwarfare people would do both. A disable the off switch (force it on) and b) drop a graphite bomb at a key place to do weeks worth of damage. That's proper "cyber" warfare.
Cyber"warriors" know the exploit for the radar station and disable the air defences as they fly in with real bombs.
Cyber"guerilla"s mess with account numbers in the fund transfer excels of most of the big companies in the place they target.
There's a whole load of resources which are needed for this stuff. Real test suites where you actually have the control systems of your enemies nuclear power plants; actual buildings where you can try messing up the air conditioning system, people who can actually write serious, fully EAL7 compliant defence systems. People who can write EAL7 compliant versions of exploits (have you seen the state of security software????). etc. etc. etc.
If you think your country's military doesn't have a valid role to play in a "cyberwar" then you haven't understood the difference between a "cyberterrorist" putting an "easter egg" into a flight control system and a "cyberwarrior" diverting all your civilians into the area where his nukes can strike them most effectively.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
This is not the first time Russian government reveals its unique idiotic approach to technology. As a former Russian citizen I am following the drama of Russian government politics in technology, which, synthetically speaking, is a laughing stock of Russian technoblogging community.
Basically, the technology policy of the Russian government does not differ much from:
1. New exciting promising technology discovered!!
2. ???
3. Profit (get recognition, re-establish mother Russia as a world superpower, look wise, etc)
Replace ??? with "flood zillions of roubles into this technology without any sense of balanced budget" (which was the case of "nanotechnologies") or in this case "propose a treaty to curb technology".
One would think that smartass KGB spy would do better than idiot Khruschev, but no... the result is the same: embarrassment and ostracism of Russia on the international level.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
And yet, the CIA was able to explode a Soviet natural gas pipeline simply by inserting some code into the pipeline control software the Soviets were stealing from the Canadians. "The result was the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space,..."
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I think it is because there are remote installations that need to be operated from a single location.
The power grid is a lot of generators (scaling from enormous powerplants to small scale wind/solar and other types of production, including stuff that can be switched on and off all the time such as gas engines).
Someone has to control the whole lot of it in order to balance power production and consumption.
I see no way that we can do that without actually connecting the whole lot to a network. It would be awesome if it was a completely independent network - but the internet is there anyway... why no use it in a secure way?
(Note: I am no expert - I just expressed my opinion, which happens to contain a lot of technical assumptions)