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McAfee CSO Issues Warning On the 'New Cold War'
angry tapir writes "The Cold War between the USA and the USSR may have ended in 1991, but a new conflict involving the same enemies has emerged on the digital frontier, according to McAfee's US chief security officer. Brett Wahlin, a former North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) counter intelligence agent, told Computerworld Australia that the RSA token hack in March this year – where the token information was used to infiltrate US defense contractor Lockheed Martin – used the same espionage tactics he encountered while serving as an agent from 1987 to 1991 with the US army for NATO."
"It seems the targets like Lockheed Martin are starting to get softened up. This isn't the end game; there is something bigger coming down the pipe and what we are seeing right now is a prelude to that. There could be a new warfare doctrine been created. I was in that world [NATO] for so long that when it looks and feels like a Cold War, there may be something else going down."
Congratulations on the nebulous statements, sir. You rival politicians. Not a single one of these statements is falsifiable. Oh, you're the head of a company that sells remedies to this horrible future? You don't say ...
<Zoidberg> I'll take one "security" please! </Zoidberg>
My work here is dung.
Mein Führer! I can walk!
Task Mangler
A new online Cold War huh? For clarity we should call this one the Flame War.
Next will be scare tactics from the watchers saying we need to give up more liberties to ensure a safe and secure future for the children.
There is no USSR anymore and the article says the new enemies are possibly North Korea and China - not Russia. What an incredibly misleading summary (I know I shouldn't be surprised).
(picture of a pear goes here)
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
If he succeeds in selling the idea that there is a new Cold War which oh so happens to be fought with the product his company sells then he is in line to get a hefty ton of money from people spending money on their quackery. There is a reason why all of a sudden McAfee started complaining about losing the war on computer security and companies such IBM started warning that there is a supercomputer arms race between China and the US and the US was about to lose. It's all about generating demand where there is none and creating a market for something which isn't needed.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.
There lies a fundamental difference between the USSR vs. USA Cold War and the so-called USA vs. China Cold War: the USA just might collapse under its own weight just as the USSR did. America does not have the collective scientific, engineering, and military resources it once had. Our military is strung thin and war weary and our mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers are going into financial careers. Our economy has stagnated with unemployment at a high for this century. Also, our infrastructure such as roads, bridges, electrical grid, etc. is crumbling whereas in China it is growing. Towards the end of the first cold war, conditions in the USSR were economically very, very bad and there was an omnipresence of political infighting which ultimately lead to its demise. History may repeat itself yet again since the similar conditions can be found here in the USA>
"I was in that world [NATO] for so long that when it looks and feels like a Cold War, there may be something else going down."
So it's not Cold War, and summary title is wrong?
May I suggest a new name? It's the Cloud War. Just to be even more nebulous.
If you sell hacked information or talk about telco systems, what has changed?.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Koch_(hacker) - was found burned to death with gasoline in a forest near Celle in 1989.
Post cold war if you talk in open court about the reality of cell phone tracking eg. Adamo Bove was the head of security at Telecom Italia
He was found under a freeway overpass.
Costas Tsalikidis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kostas_Tsalikidis was a 38-year-old software engineer for Vodaphone in Greece.
He uncovered a highly sophisticated bug embedded in the mobile network. Spyware eavesdropped on the Greek prime Minister and other top officials’ cell phone
calls; it even monitored the car phone of Greece’s secret service chief.
His mother found him hanging outside of his apartment bathroom in 2005.
Whats changed? The front end is a MS/token sellers hourly dream that attracts UFO hunters using 56k modems. The back end seems the same.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
McAfee doesn't sell remedies for anything (other than a remedy for a lack of McAfee software).
None of the "anti-virus" companies do. Because the way they're currently structured is as a reactive process.
Bad guys release a new "virus".
Users get infected.
Someone sends the infected files to McAfee.
McAfee releases new "signatures" to detect the new virus.
Repeat.
And McAfee makes a lot of money off of that process. Meanwhile, users keep getting infected by "mal-ware". It's so bad that you cannot even depend upon McAfee to detect all the "mal-ware" that is detected by other anti-virus products from a week ago. Why should you need to run multiple scans from multiple products to clear a Windows machine?
Where's the bootable CD from McAfee that will at least be able to identify what is known to be a regular Windows file and what has not been identified before? With a way to move those questionable files to external storage / submit them to McAfee?
But why spend money on something that might help? Particularly when just giving interviews about how things MIGHT get worse will generate more revenues for your company?
Colour me cynical.
But we always have been in war against Eurasia?!
As others have said, this article and many others are the primer for FUDing the public to allow the internet to be locked down into governmenland-net--or at least being to apathetic too care when it happens. OMGTEHHAXORS WILL RUIN US DONT FIX OUR NETWORKZ OR INTERNETZ JUST MAKE IT MORE SECUR LIKE DA TSA DOEZ AIRPORTZ!!!!@#!@#
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Considering how badly McAfee's enterprise security software sucks ass, this guy is the last person I'd take security advice from.
I'm not just blowing smoke here, I've worked in IT at companies large and small for 20 years, and every time an employer has used a McAfee anti-whatever solution, I've seen more viruses and malware infected users than you can imagine. Their software simply does not work. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone scared of the cyber-future. Maybe he'll drive some business to Norton :)
...when he told Henry Kissinger that the Cold War wasn't over on Monday night.
take it as you will
Sorry. When he makes references to the cold war and says it's a sign of "something bigger coming down the pipeline" lets go back to the history books and see what came down the pipeline. The USSR collapsed. There was no global nuclear war. --- www.awkwardengineer.com
I wouldn't fuck him with your 10 foot logic probe!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Just wanted to make that clear in this discussion. I only know their retail product, which is a bloated, ugly mess. Maybe their enterprise products are better, but after clearing McAfee garbage off several friend's PCs the past few years, I wouldn't touch anything they make with a 10 foot pole.
The only thing changing is that IT in general is generally considered a "cost center" to trim, IT security an even less indirectly profitable component of that cost center, and management of most organizations is becoming more aggressive at reducing that cost. Add outsourcing and subcontracting issues and you end up with a system where there is real interest only in having an appearance of security, and standard practices revolve around plausible deniability and passing the buck.
Almost everyone whose been in enterprise security for a while has a collection of cringe worthy stories they cannot share... (sigh)
How are we supposed to even try to compete when politicians are doing everything they can to decrease overall competitiveness?
They wont pay for education so that the brightest minds can actually learn the necessary knowledge whatever it is.
They wont pay to build infrastructure to actually take advantage of those bright minds.
They wont pass a competitive budget to fund it all because they don't want to raise taxes.
So basically politicians are arguing about who will pay the Chinese and how. They aren't even trying to compete with the Chinese. The reason is because the USA has already been internally conquered. There wont be any competitive coldwar. If the USA wanted to truly compete then they'd start with making college free for all American citizens. Suddenly you'd have more engineers, computer scientists, mathematicians, and whatever else is needed. Secondly the USA could just draft whoever they need from the private sector. If there is some brilliant mathematician, or some brilliant hacker in IRC, nothing stops the US government from simply creating a cyber militia or cyber corps and drafting them into it. The selective service provides a legal basis, as does the Constitution.
So there really is no excuse for this other than general political incompetence. The weakness is in the law making policy making part of the system. The military does a great job defending the system overall. The law enforcement do a great job enforcing the laws overall and locking people up. The courts do a great job distributing justice. The only real weakness seems to be that our laws are fucking stupid, irrational, dumb. We pass laws which criminalize the majority of our own citizens, and then we end up having to enforce those laws locking ourselves up. Then we wonder why we aren't as competitive as we could have been.
On top of that we don't even try to build anything. We won't use the government to invest in infrastructure and the government wont use it's muscle to infect the private sector and make it invest in infrastructure. We can't or wont defend civil liberties so that citizens would actually feel like there is a country worth saving, and then we wonder why nobody is defending the country?
Form a goddamn militia if it's a cyber war. Draft a few million cyber soldiers into it. Pay them, give them jobs, give them an education, give them healthcare and other benefits, and let them work from home/telecommute and I guarantee most Americans will take that offer if the pay is in the same range as the private sector or even if it's a bit less. But as it's going now, the government is treating it like a cyber security law enforcement problem. They are saying a new war docrtine has to be created? So create the doctrine and present that to Slashdot. Then utilitze a draft, and I think if they wanted to they could have a million cyber soldiers within a year just by drafting them.
The government is taking something simple (at least on the surface), and making it over complicated. If you look at history, when nations were threatened they drafted their best, and they pit their best against the other nations best. But right now our nation probably wouldn't even be willing to fund the initiative.
Russia has their own problems. When communism went down, they had a power vacuum, which was filled by organized crime. For a while, Russia had rule by "oligarchs". Putin managed to get the biggest oligarchs under control, the ones big enough to challenge national power. But there are still too many crooks per capita left, and they tend to be too closely tied to parts of the Government.
This is why we have so much trouble with various computer attacks out of Russia. Some are private, some may be actual military intrusions, and some may be private parties trying to get info they can sell to the military.
Bear in mind that Russia (and many third world countries) have little private fiefdoms within their military. Generals running profit-making businesses on the side isn't at all unusual in much of the world, especially when the military is better organized than the rest of the country. (This is a disease of countries with too big a military and not enough for them to do. The US military is so busy nobody has time for that nonsense. Homeland Security, though...)
And America as well as the west, are losing badly. The reason is that China and Russia are keeping it quiet.
of salesmen.
the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
One basement's as good as another.
But how are we going to prevent all these women in the confines of the bunker from synchronizing their cycles?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I read between the lines and came away with this : blah blah security threats blah blah worse every day blah blah mcaffee blah blah most secure blah blah blah even withstood anonymous blah blah scary cybermercs coming blah blah buy from us blah blah
Sure Mc A fee has a problem with Russia. Kaspersky Labs is taking a lot of their business away.
Thaks for the article.
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