Slashdot Mirror
UK Announces "Cyber Strategy"
concealment writes "The UK government has announced a 'cyber strategy' outlining its plans to make the UK a safe place to do business online. Not limited to merely defending against attacks, the strategy outlines plans to take aggressive, proactive online action against security threats and criminals. Stricter enforcement of Internet usage restrictions and recruitment of volunteer 'cyber-specials' are also planned."
An interesting bit from the article: "In promising to undertake aggressive, military cyberattacks, the UK will be following in the footsteps of the U.S. and Israel — together the presumed creators of the Stuxnet worm — and China, a nation regularly accused of infiltrating and compromising both private and government organizations to extract information."
My "Cyber Strategy": I put on my robe and wizard hat.
UK governments can't even stop foreign criminals walking through the doors at the airports, nevermind computer viruses with malicious intent coming along the wires. The ministers probably can't even spell "cyberwarfare" never mind understand how to counter it.
And given the record we have of foaming at the mouth histrionic "rights" activists with brains the size of peanuts it wouldn't surprise me if some bunch of right-on swampies start a protest group for the right to existence free of persecution of said viruses and trojans.
If you are organizing a cyber division of your military, and one of your first inclinations is to alert the media. your more than likely are going to suck as as an administrator for said cyber division. Either that, or you are just hoping that the mere rumor you have such a division will deter would-be cyber combatants from picking you as a target.
Stricter enforcement of Internet usage restrictions and recruitment of volunteer 'cyber-specials' are also planned."
Three guesses (hint) what that means? I suggest the name "Special TAskforce Security Internet" or STASI, and it will recruit volunteers from the general public to spy on other members of the general public, to make sure they adhere to the Internet "usage restrictions" that are of course necessary to protect the rights holders.
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
So far the UK government has managed to do 0% of the things it says it will do, so I fully expect these measures to go precisely nowhere. Of course they'll annouce several monumenatally draconian and ineffective policies that they will later backtrack on before allowing this initiative to fade away.
Good sir, That is not what makes it 1984. it's when there's an effing camera on every effing street corner all controlled by the state that we scream 1984.But that will change. No one over here reads anymore, so soon no will even know what 1984 is if someone screams it.And yes, being able to film officers in uniform performing duties of their office is a vital check and balance for warding off corrupt or inept uses of power, especially when it's illegal to resist arrest. If you don't think that's important, you deserve what you get.
I've worked in IT for 20+ years. During that time, the security of systems has plummeted. The behaviour required to run systems with a level of 'hygiene' and appropriate controls has been systemic and eroding. Most businesses I see have most staff running as Admin, on old Windows machinery. And you can include significant chunks of government and elsewhere in the same state.
Spyware, and malware have reached a state where defenses and defensive measures are overwhelmed, beaten, ineffective - and the sheer scale and size of 'IT' structures out runs all efforts unless they are highly controlled environments. The points mooted by the Foreign minister are deeply delusional. The idea that you'd open up your security to try and encircle the shambles that is the real world computational landscape is erroneous.
The engineers get over-ruled by management, and the scale of the failings are the end result.
Most Chinese Government sponsored actors (and others) are able to walk into the greater number of interesting targets, and circumvent the appalling data protection layering - and take what they like.
And in due course, if you want to see the full scale hilarity and complete lack of knowledge in the area, I expect UK ministers to be signing up to deals with
http://www.huawei.com/uk/
in due course. At which point you can take it as read that its business as usual and that nobody who talked about it had any idea about what they are talking about.
Current data systems, and how they are operated from are fundamentally broken, and nobody can fix it as it currently stands. It required whole root and branch rethinking, incluing the idea that software can ship, be sold and be used full of security holes and problems, and the authors can write a license that eradicates all responsibility for it in totality, and the world just goes round building stuff on sand.
We`re all equal
They should also give Harry Pearce the ability to turn off the internet... just in case any more Russian submarines attempt to hack the UKs internet.