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UK Plans Cyber Weapons Program
An anonymous reader writes "The Ministry of Defence says they are working on a range of offensive cyber weapons to increase the country's defensive capabilities. The armed forces minister, Nick Harvey, says, 'The consequences of a well planned, well executed attack against our digital infrastructure could be catastrophic With nuclear or biological weapons, the technical threshold is high. With cyber the finger hovering over the button could be anyone from a state to a student.'"
As soon as the US declares any cyber attack an act of war. Every country has to jump on the bandwagon -.-
"Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"
Offensive weapons to increase defensive capabilities. Why not increase understanding of proper coding to increase defensive capabilities? It seems to be easier to tear something down than to build it right. Git.
Thanks in advance,
Slashdots' Readership.
"With nuclear or biological weapons, the technical threshold is high. With cyber the finger hovering over the button could be anyone from a state to a student"
What a crock. Any engineering student who couldn't design a fission based nuclear bomb is going to be a terrible engineer. Hell, the guy who has literally "written the book" on the Manhattan Project bombs is a freaking truck driver*. And you have the same with biological weapons. Contrary to what movies show most research into biological weapons wasn't about genetic modification it was simply on how to make the bugs easy to disperse and store. And most of it was done in the 50's and 60's. To combat misuse of both the answer has been to control the key ingredients of isotopes and germs.
With "cyber" weapons it is the opposite. It is impossible to control the key ingredient, and the 'state of the art' has moved far past the stage where individuals are dominant. Even in the criminal world malware is built by teams. The technical threshold is very high and no individual is going to pull off well planned and well executed attack against a nations infrastructure. The "cyber wars" we see now are all done by large teams of hackers. When nations start actively deploying "cyber warfare" units and the like it will further raise the technical bar.
P.S. The fingers actually "hovering over the buttons" of NBC weapons were mostly 18-20 year old kids. The systems you see in movies where the president needs to give a code so nukes can be launched is mostly a crock. The US Strategic Air Command famously set the "permissive action locks" on its nukes to the equivalent of "1111" because it believed the system was too complicated to be relied upon.
*http://www.amazon.com/Atom-Bombs-Secret-Inside-Little/dp/B0006S2AJ0
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
develop offensive weapons for defensive purposes....riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight
Nick Harvey, says, 'The consequences of a well planned, well executed attack against our digital infrastructure could be catastrophic With nuclear or biological weapons, the technical threshold is high. With cyber the finger hovering over the button could be anyone from a state to a student.'"
Shuuure; The missile is just gonna arm itself, and intangible cyber villains are going to bypass the physical electrical & mechanical safety mechanisms.
Sounds like someone's been watching too much Lawnmower Man. If a team of cyber villains is all it takes to launch/detonate warheads, We'd all be dead by now. Yeah, theoretically you would need a hacker on your nuclear terrorist infiltration team.
I suggest you take a break from the Fear-mongering... Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
HEY DUMB-ASSES -- Here's a fucking idea -- Instead of running in fear, wasting tax payer dollars on protecting us from cyber triggered nuclear war -- Why don't we just say: "Fuck it! Everyone's got hackers now! -- Game over, we have to disarm all nuclear bombs in case an angsty 4chan goer decides to an hero via nukes."
US, North Korea, China and the UK all decide to Cyber together.
.... just break it.
That is all they want to do- apart form (ab)use it for evil purposes.
..military grade LOIC or what??...
I believe he's using "the button" to draw a parallel between an attack over the internet and somebody launching nuclear attack.
I didn’t take it to mean that hackers can easily control the systems capable of launching a nuclear attack.
Nick Harvey is a wanker
It only takes a small effort to weaponize ITIL.
I give it two months before sone local council is using these "cyber weapons" to punish people putting out bins for collection on the wrong days.
Bullshit news. When surfing the Web 15 years ago I remember very well when I stumbled over the official pages of some .mil sites that developed electronic weapons, e.g. a Navy research laboratory that was specialized in electronic warfare (among other things). Of course, the pages were pretty vague but nevertheless it seems plausible to assume that the US has been building offensive "cyberwapons" at various research laboratories at least since the end of the 90s. Moreover, the NSA was probably among the first institutions worldwide to massively use all-purpose computers; it would be outright bizarre if nobody there had ever considered writing a virus to infiltrate enemy systems up until now...
The idea of "Cyber Weapons" is a deliberately wrong paradigm whose only purpose is to wring money out of national defense agencies. A cyber attack is nothing more than an idea. If you know something about computer security which the other guy doesn't, you can attack him with it. But as soon as he (or his operating system or antivirus vendor) knows it too, you've got nothing.
This is completely unlike a weapon. An AK-47 is still deadly even if your opponent knows what an assault rifle is, but an unpatched SQL injection vulnerability is useless the moment your opponent learns about it.
Ban it now before it is too late - join the CCD (Campaign for Cyber Disarmament)!
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so there are some backdoors, trojans etc in the OS
so there is the dominance of Closed Source Software to allow this
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then it is too expensive to produce hard-to-access systems for the critical areas.
even if they would have such systems, then there are too many critical areas ro deploy them without being noticed
- I fear these cyber militant statements are preparing a decoy target of standard systems - inviting for an attack
which will be the reason for the next military action.
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so there are some backdoors, trojans etc in the OS
so there is the dominance of Closed Source Software to allow this
- then it is too expensive to produce hard-to-access systems for the critical areas.
even if they would have such systems, then there are too many critical areas ro deploy them without being noticed
- I fear these cyber militant statements are preparing a decoy target of standard systems - inviting for an attack
which will be the reason for the next military action.
... they already have a surgical assassination team trained in both WoW and Farmville.
I8-D
Every time you use the word "cyber" your credibility drops by 20%.
In the last 3 weeks we have had a number posts relating to different counties creating "Cyber teams", I bet that the USA has just started selling Cyber team training to the other governments of the world and now trying to get every country to sign up to their Cyber incentive, that way the USA would end up training all the Cyber teams of the world and in turn have a hand in all their systems.
Anyway my issue is WHY are Critical infrastructure systems even on a public network? and why are governments now thinking they own this virtual space? I guess it is just the role of a government to take land from the people regardless of where it is.
Yesterday it is stated that the US would now go to war over cyber attacks? and 'hacks'? I see this going really well, Anon decides one day to route an attack via russia, USA responds with Nukes, Russia gets reset lulz for everyone (minus russians who would hopefully see the funny side). You think the guys attacking Sony could not get in to critical infrastructure systems? these companies most likely have been out sourced to a company that does anything to keep profits up and most likely has a basic computer system. I bet they could there just has been no reason to mess with the system that much now. But now USA has threaten war maybe some group might decide that taking down all the critical systems start a war.
Side note this is mostly coming about because of Anon threatening massive economic internet companies like Sony and Amazon Cloud
Like every other government IT project, it'll be farmed out to the usual incompetent suspects, like EDF or Crapita. And it'll be delivered ten years late, while coming in an order of magnitude over budget. And it'll only deliver 20% of what was originally specified.
Happens every time
I suppose Steve Moffat will be employed to bring the cybermen to "life".
Todd: I hope it proves as delicious as the farmers that grew them
they are working on a range of offensive cyber weapons to increase the country's defensive capabilities
This kind of thinking shows the plan is doomed to failure before a single module of american software has been bought (at hyper-inflated prices) - which is the standard british technique for <strike> doing what the americans tell them to </strike> implementing a defence strategy.
While that might (although since it was impossible to test, we'll never really know) have been a successful strategy for nuclear war - when there were only 2 sides and therefore no uncertainty who the "enemy" was, it falls down in so many blindingly obvious ways when every man and his dog (bith within and without) is a potential threat.
What this attitude really tells us is that the plan is NOT one of defending a country against external attacks on it's computers, but to gain the ability to exert it's will against others by means of force.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
if only we had some sort of distributed network infrastructure that could mitigate any attacks on it and re-route around any damage, be a good idea
HEY HEY 16K, R: Tape Loading Error, Thursday (NTK) — GCHQ has begun work on a range of uniquely British cyber-weapons to add to Britain's defensive capability.
"Cyber-Space," said General Jonathan Shaw, pronouncing the hyphen between the words, "represents conflict without borders. But we can use the finest of British technical pluck to fight off Johnny Cyberforeigner!"
"We need a toolbox of capabilities," said armed forces minister Nick Harvey."For instance, we have a truckload of old Psion EPOCs, which are excellent for hand-to-hand combat. We can also demoralise the enemy with talk of what a fantastic OS it has and how their Nokia with Symbian just can't compare. Then, of course, we drive a truck over them."
Other research weapons include Sinclair ZX81 ninja stars, BBC Model B boat anchors and more ethically questionable devices such as Amstrad Emailer land mines.
Harvey did not specify where future threats might come from. "It would be foolish to assume the West can always dictate the pace and direction of this cyber-techno-electrickery-logy-stuff. Thing. I understand there are clever people in the world who don't even live in Britain. Imagine that!
The cyber-warfare initiative is anticipated to fully achieve its objectives over the next five years, those being a suitably fattened defence budget and continuing contract bungs to BAE Systems.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
"offensive cyber weapons" aka "malware"
Put in wider historical perspective, probably first non-hunting weapons ever (such as e.g. swords) were also instruments of criminals before they achieved their glorified status.
If there is such a thing as cyber weapons, and a cyber attack can be an act of war, does a government cyber attack on civilians constitute a war crime legally?
Korma: Good
We'll run out of food. The Chinese Stink Bug invasion has already started. These pests are not only obnoxious, but destroy fruit and vegetable crops. We'll have no healthy food of our own and will be forced to eat "high protein" Melanine laced products. Everyone will get sick and die. Now that's modern warfare borrowing from the time honored traditions of humanity.