Slashdot Mirror
Behind Cyberwar FUD
Nicola Hahn writes "The inevitable occurred this week as The Economist broached the topic of cyberwar with a couple of articles in its July 3rd issue. The first article concludes that 'countries should agree on more modest accords, or even just informal "rules of the road" that would raise the political cost of cyber-attacks.' It also makes vague references to 'greater co-operation between governments and the private sector.' When attribution is a lost cause (and it is), international treaties are meaningless because there's no way to determine if a participant has broken them. The second recommendation is even more alarming because it's using a loaded phrase that, in the past couple of years, has been wielded by those who advocate Orwellian solutions. The other article is a morass of conflicting messages. It presumes to focus on cyberwar, yet the bulk of the material deals with cybercrime and run-of-the-mill espionage. Then there's also the standard ploy of hypothetical scenarios: depicting how we might be attacked and what the potential outcome of these attacks could be. The author concludes with the ominous warning that terrorists 'prefer the gory theatre of suicide-bombings to the anonymity of computer sabotage — for now.' What's truly disturbing is that The Economist never goes beyond a superficial analysis of the topic to examine what's driving all of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (PDF), a subject dealt with in this Lockdown 2010 white paper."
The Economist is a bit conservative on the side business, but as far as being their lackey - I'm not so sure about that. Sometimes they come out with things that can be interpreted as almost anti-business. They've also been doing some rather critical pieces on BP lately as an example.
Or is BP behind on their payments to the Economist?
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
The internet was designed for convenience and reliability, not security.
The logical conclusion should be, "disconnect security sensitive systems from the Internet, go back to the older ways of managing those systems and design more secure networks for those systems." Oh, sorry, I forgot that convenience is actually more important than anything else, so that will never happen.
Palm trees and 8
Before you start dismissing the article without reading it, they do have a very good point that cyberattacks by governments should have consequences for those for those governments. If Russia were to blow up the HQ of a company they didn't like, everybody would up in arms about, but if they hire a bunch of script kiddies to go in an wipe the company's server farm (effectively destroying the company), it probably wouldn't even draw a comment from the State Department. That's not a good precedent to set for the future...