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."

Comments

Difference

[DaMattster]

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>

Cold war? Espionage tactics changed?

[AHuxley]

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.