Slashdot Mirror
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.
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).
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.
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 :)
take it as you will