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Americans More Worried About Cybersecurity Than Terrorism
TheGift73 tips an article discussing a new study (PDF) which found Americans are now more worried about cybersecurity threats than they are about terrorism. Here's Techdirt's acerbic take:
"Well, it looks like all the fearmongering about hackers shutting down electrical grids and making planes fall from the sky is working. No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually connect such critical infrastructure to the internet (the proper response to which is: take it off the internet), fear is spreading. Of course, this is mostly due to the work of a neat combination of ex-politicians/now lobbyists working for defense contractors who stand to make a ton of money from the panic — enabled by politicians who seem to have no shame in telling scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality."
Has always been an effective tactic for manipulating public opinion.
He who controls the media, controls the future.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
To be fair, at least some of the compromised systems in Iran weren't connected to the Internet.
Just because you're paranoid don't mean they're not after you.
The evidence and risk is there, despite the usual skepticism in the black-helicopter, false-flag crowd. I've seen it, the threat is real.
Just what I always wanted. Another boogie-man that I can give up all my rights to be protected from. Now I can both pay more in taxes to be protected and lose more of those freedoms and the privacy I wasn't really using anyhow.
/end-sarcasm
With any luck this will work exactly as well as it did with the pervious boogie-man of terrorism. You know none of their plots would ever get foiled if not for the government taking away all our nasty freedoms.
At this rate I can soon be totally free of rights, which means I should be absolutely safe the same way that people in prison are perfectly safe.
Isn't cyberterrorism a threat? That way we can worry about it all at the same time, which is really more efficient don't ya know.
If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living.
- SENECA, Epistles
The only thing we have to fear is fear itself--nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT, First Inaugural Address, Mar. 4, 1933
Fear is the parent of cruelty.
- JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE, Short Studies on Great Subjects
No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
-EDMUND BURKE, On the Sublime and Beautiful
And, of course, inevitably:
Fear is the path to the Dark Side. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering.
- YODA, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Along with every other movie/show that portrays hacking as a ridiculously quick, all powerful weapon.
It is a useful plot tool, you can make all kinds of hypothetical situation sound plausible because of peoples ignorance. Then if you reinforce this enough with next movie people start to believe it.
Maybe it's manipulating in the right direction. If reason alone can't change the average person person's habits (delaying system patches/anti-virus updates, throwing caution to the wind when receiving email/chat attachments), while a little fear can, then maybe that fear is a good thing. I'd say anti-smoking campaigns using shock/disgust to reach their audience are on the same level. At least we won't get our genitals fondled by strangers*
*not to imply there aren't people who enjoy that.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Cyber-security and all security, especially any that involves taking liberty, people, property or information without notice, a warrant, or a clear basis IS terrorism and IS unconstitutional. It doesn't mater if some government agency justifies it based on some claimed risk or threat. It's speculative and pre-facto.
To quote H.L. Mencken, 'The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.' (or as we now see in our lives, intentionally created by the government itself)
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power.
I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I travelled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.
JJ
I use my netbook to turn off lift. It makes planes fall out of the sky. I knew that I'd become a terrorist when I ran apt-get install alter-universe-fundamental-forces, I just didn't care.
PLANES! The planes, I reign, fall mainly in the plains. Turbulence, that's me. Fuck all y'all. I do it for the lulz.
I am very sorry, but reading this article made me lose braininess. Next I'll be laughing at Dolan comics.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Terrorism's a solved now isn't it? They killed Osama, and we've got all those TSA people preventing terrorism all over the place. The government's doing something, so there's no more risk.
Meanwhile, cyberterrorism? I don't really understand all this cyber stuff. If I don't understand it, it must be scary. Also, where's the TSA for cyberspace? We need the TSA to be secure don't we? I can't see any cyberterrorism countermeasures in my every day life. We must be doing nothing! And it's scary!
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
Hacking causes a lot more damage than terrorists ever did.
Illiterate, donkey riding, half starved, hyper religious nutbags with AK47's and common explosives have the most fearsome, multi trillion dollar super/mega military/intelligence/surveillance machine ever to exist, ANYWHERE at a strategic standstill! and even more this handful of inbreds (less than a thousand, Al Whastsa or so I've heard) so much so as to have made the Land of the FREE into the Land of the Spied upon/Groped, bugged and X-Rayed! Even if these guy's could commandeer some rusty Soviet era military boat, what are they gonna do? I'll take my chances and have my freedom back!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
1. Paying Bills.
2. Keeping Job.
3. Doing Something Really Stupid.
4. Dying.
8. Computer Loss / Breakage.
9. Internet Access Offline.
10. Crashing Car.
11. Getting Sick.
22. Radiation at Airports / in Airplanes.
45. Getting Groped by Security Idiots.
46. Cable TV Access Offline.
9989. Computer security (I use UNIX bitches).
30452. Terrorists.
30453. Hello Kitty.
I'm concerned about cybersecurity, but I'm not concerned about cyber threats translating to physical threats, but rather economic threats, and they are very much real.
Namely, getting my identity stolen or having US technology secrets getting stolen by somebody who hasn't invested the R&D into it. Namely, 50 years of NASA research being stolen, which has already happened.
I'm sure there are many slashdotters out there who believe that tech secrets should be free, but I don't think so. When you put effort into a project, only to have somebody else rip off your idea and implement it with none of that cost, and therefore they can implement it cheaper than you can, making your entire effort go to waste, is really underhanded and in my opinion unfair.
And before somebody says getting your identity stolen is only the result of your own stupidity, think again. It's often necessary for you to give out important personal information in order to do business. And even in spite of their best efforts to keep their systems secure, even if they made all of the right choices and didn't let their security practices laps, zero day vulnerabilities always manage to show up.
For these reasons, I think cybersecurity should definitely be a concern.
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
I don't trust executive summaries of polling data; I want to see the entire questionnaire so I can understand the context in which the questions were asked. I'd bet that if people were asked an open-ended question about the "problems facing our country today" cyberterrorism would be lucky to get a 1% response. Here are the top items from the most recent New York Times/CBS poll released yesterday:
Economy and jobs 62%
Federal budget deficit 11
Health care 9
Same-sex marriage 7
Foreign policy 4
Immigration 2
Other/DK 4
I don't see terrorism of any sort on that list.
Even if we accept the findings of the survey, what is most striking in the results is the substantial increase in respondents who say they are "not concerned" about the threats asked about compared to a year ago.
Moreover at least one question has nothing to do with IT, the one about respondents' ability to "meet essential financial obligations." For more relevant questions, solid majorities report being only "somewhat" or "not concerned" about the security of online shopping and banking, computer viruses and spam email, and their own personal security.
The IT media has a habit of touting these self-serving studies by organizations like, in this case, Unisys as somehow providing an "objective" view of public opinion. Puh-leeze.
My fear is based on my trust ( or lack of it ).
I have had my share of web mischief.
It should not be possible to do this. But, in order to be interoperable with others, I have to use software whose ulterior motivations are unknown to me.
I was taught in computer science the risks of mixing code and data, yet we send "applets", claimed safe.
How do I know when one carries a keylogger or password stealer trojan?
I'd rather not have code in my data at all. This whole thing started when we assigned certain ANSI sequences to do execute, then the birth of the "ANSI bomb". So early 80's. We still have not learned our lesson.
Yes, I fear cyberterrorism in the same way I would fear climbing a tall ladder around those who would gleefully topple the thing just to watch me fall.
Would you feel safe climbing a tall ladder after you have had one inexplicably fail?
With all the antivirus companies out there trying to keep mischief out of overcomplex software, I would gladly settle for a secure subset of a much simpler software for stuff involving online business. Say, pure vanilla HTML which honors a simple subset of text, images, and sound. Any business needing an extension would have to provide it - and be responsible for its behaviour.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I've said it before that all you need to take down the electrical grid is for or five teams with high powered rifles and an SUVs. Nothing you can't legally buy in any small town in the country. So how is the government going to protect against that vector?
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
I mean cyberterrorism isn't a huge risk, but "real" terrorism is even less of a problem. It's not like anything like the 9/11 attacks could ever happen again. (As so many people have pointed out, it took the passengers of flight 93 less than an hour to figure out how to prevent that kind of attack from being effective.) Short of terrorists actually managing to acquire a nuclear weapon any direct attacks they carry out will probably be pretty small and totally dwarfed by all the more mundane dangers we face in our day to day lives and have learned to live with.
_If_ cyberterrorists managed to bring down a portion of the powergrid it would probably affect more people than a "regular" attack, though since hospitals and such usually have backup power the actual number of deaths might be lower.
Though to be "fair", the cynical part of me suspects that this has nothing to do with people actually getting grip on how little a risk terrorism actually represents currently and does indeed have a lot more to do with fearmongering and a lack of understanding of computer networks in general.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
According to TFA, the questions regarded how important is it for Presidential candidates to tell us about security threats.
My response is NOT AT ALL. There will be zero difference in their approach to security threats
The question isn't even worth considering when comparing Presidential candidates.
Ask them about what they will do that's DIFFERENT.
Wait no! Seriously. We have a problem with our SCADA systems being very vulnerable and very connected to the internet. I've been warning people for years. You should be afraid. And, I don't stand to make any money from this. I've been mentioning this long before it was cool. (Is it now?) And, the reaction my fellow americans have always given me is one of complete apathy. I'm not sure if it's true or not that "fear is spreading," I certainly haven't seen it.
"Well, it looks like all the fearmongering about terrorists blowing up buildings and making planes fall from the sky is working. No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually permit another terrorist to take control of the plane by using explosive underwear, fear is spreading. Of course, this is mostly due to the work of a neat combination of ex-politicians/now lobbyists working for defense contractors who stand to make a ton of money from the panic — enabled by politicians who seem to have no shame in telling scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality."
FTFY
Bow before me, for I am root.
Everyone only worries about the cybersecurity threats coming from their government. The rest of the threats are easily dealt with.
Bubba can fix terrorism. Not so much with cybersecurity.
Hey guess what, Americans have every right to be more worried about "cyber security" than terrorism. Odds are MUCH more likely that the average US citizen will be the victim of foreign-born cyber attack than physical terrorism. Of course most of those threats are categorized under "crime" than "warfare." Whether that is malware like the Zeus trojans, industrial espionage, etc. Regardless of how you categorize it, we spend too much time looking at people's shoes at the airport, and not enough time hardening our public and private IT infrastructure. The public has it right this time.
Fearmongering or not, if it might mean less dollars for useless crap like the TSA and more dollars for cyber-security research (and everything related) and security-focused public awareness campaigns, that is nothing but a good thing IMO.
victim of cyber fraud. So there is a good reason they are afraid of hackers... terrorists are yesterday's news.
The world can't even recover from all this terrorist theater and they are already seeding their next big way of profiting from fear.
none
I think the combination of terrorism and cybersecurity is what worries me. I suspect that terrorists will eventually figure out that they can create cheap electromagnetic radiation bombs and set them off on election day as a denial of service attack on districts that are likely to vote for a particular party. Similarly, doing the same thing around wall street could also cause a lot of havok for a very little amount of money. And, why bother knocking planes out of the sky when you can drive up to the fence just outside an air force base, and mess up all the computers in all the jets on the runway. There is probably a lot of other creative things you could do.
I completely disagree with the author of this article. The nuclear power plant that was taken offline by Stuxnet in Iran was not connected to the internet..... furthermore, most critical systems (as one reader commented) are in fact connected to the internet via one means or another - either by oversight, ignorance, or both. The fact remains that you are vulnerable regardless of internet connectivity, and the situation is worsened by SCADA vendors who don't patch their code, even when vulnerabilities are announced publicly. The cybersecurity capacity of the United States is woefully inadequate, particularly in the area of critical network defense. Not sure about you, but I'll put my tinfoil hat back on now....
Not politicians. Any politician with half a brain HAS to fear monger like crazy. It is, odd as it may seem, the sensible thing to do for him. And we are to blame for that!
Why, you ask?
Well, there are four possible scenarios:
First, a politician not fear mongering and nothing happening. Then it's an obvious non-issue. Nobody is scared, nothing going on. Think aliens attacking planet earth. There is no politician warning us over it, and it does not happen.
Second, a politician crying wolf like crazy and nothing happening. Then it's also a non-issue. Or did any politician not get reelected over the lack of terrorists after all the security theater we've been put through? Rights eroding, liberties being stripped and nonsensical limitations in place, but does it backfire on them? Nah.
Third, a politician warning from a danger that finally really happens. Now here's one chance for the politician to shine. He told us so! And if we only heeded his warning, we could have been safe. We should turn over the country to him. Now. And bet your sweet ass that the morons will gladly do so.
And finally, no warning and something happens. Now this could well be the death blow to a politician's career. Imagine some politician standing up and calling a spade a spade, i.e. calling the security theater a load of bull that serves no purpose and a terrorist attack happening. The media will eat him alive.
So read down that list and tell me: What would YOU do if you were a politician whose primary concern is staying a politician (i.e. the "real" politician, not the model we'd all OF COURSE be...)?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seems reasonable to me. The average person has a far higher probability of being the victim of some form of malware or cyber attack than the victim of terrorism. (Unless you count stuff like warrantless searches and TSA irradiation or genital groping as terrorism.)
Regardless of my personal beliefs, I see no reason for evolution to exclude a deity or vice versa. /.; unless the nuts are right...
This polarization reminds me of the sports mentality of US vs THEM; and it troubles me that seemingly able people are so hamstrung by such nonsense.
Metaphysical belief is is a spectrum, and people subscribe to different regions of it.
I'm proud of my 98% Chimp ancestors (although my better half thinks I'm too modest). I can relate to Christian Humanists; and can't relate to intolerant fanatics, regardless of faith.
It isn't a contest, and we will never know the answer; unless the faithful are right, but then we will never get to mumble about it on
What? We don't keep criminals out of the internet. We make them CEOs, pay them huge salaries and bonuses, and put them in charge of the companies running our communications infrastructure.
Vik :v)
Very few people in the US have experienced anything resembling a terrorist attack, but a fair number have experienced a cybersecurity breach. For example, a lot of people probably have experienced the wrong end of credit card skimming and virtually everyone who has been online has some exposure to malware and malicious websites.
Even if those aren't the proper purview of a government agency, it's still the case that we have person problems very similar to the sort of cybersecurity issues.
When someone writes a story about a bunch of DoD computers getting compromised by the Red Menace (that's China BTW), you have some sympathy since your coworker Fred had similar trouble when he was porn surfing over the weekend. Their machines got hacked, just like Fred's.
OTOH, it's not likely that someone tried to kill Fred for political purposes or to inspire fear in your work group.
by the Red Menace
By the Yellow Menace. Red is the Soviets.
Instead of arguing to teach philosophy/religion in science class, perhaps you might advocate for probability & statistics in philosophy class?
Most Americans are afraid of whatever is in the news the most. If they researched either topic even a little bit they wouldn't be afraid of either.
This post is bs. Did the poster even read the survey. Nowhere does it say cyber terrorism or cyber attacks on infrastructure. It says peole are scared of viruses and getting there credit card data stolen. these are very real threats that people should be concerned about.
Plausible stories seem easy to find.
Is stuxnet and how it was used to attack uranium processing facilities in Iran completely made up?
http://gcn.com/articles/2011/12/13/dhs-warns-us-water-power-plants-hacked.aspx
Are the easily hackable SCADA systems that appear to be connected to the Internet a complete fabrication?
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/237347/a_power_plant_hack_that_anybody_could_use.html
And that's just after two mintues of searching on Google. I agree there's politics involved, but to say these are "scary bedtime stories that have no basis in reality" seems a little off.
A computer breach is WAY more likely than me getting snuffed by so religious nutter with a gun.
Why is it that most of the people that I encounter seem to have been shat from the Sphincter of Mediocrity?
"'Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life - save only this - if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education."
--John Alexander Smith, Oxford professor of moral philosophy.
That ability doesn't necessarily cost money to acquire, which is fortunate, because in an era of Internet, talk radio, and cable "news", it is indispensable and vital.
How is making a plane fall from the sky not terrorism? Isn't cyberspace just another avenue for terrorists like it is for other criminals? Aren't you comparing apples and oranges here? It now sort of sounds like saying "people are now more scared of underwear-bombs than of terrorists".
>I'll take my chances and have my freedom back!
As will I, along with everyone else who adheres to the ideas on which America was founded.
But don't get trapped into thinking in the enemy's terms. Freedom and safety are not a tradeoff. It is more dangerous to live in North Korea than it is to live in a free country. Even a small non-free regime such as Pol Pot's equaled between 300 and 1,000 9/11s.
This is how all laws are passed.
Just look at the FDA, most licensing rackets, 'consumer protections', 'banking regulations' and so on. Sorry folks, they're not there to improve safety. They make them to rig the market in the favor of power players. They don't care about consumers.
All they have to do is scare you into believing without them, all sorts of bad things will happen. It's protection racket, expert mode.
Considering the price of education has risen, er, 270% in the last 15 years... it would seem to indicate a concerted effort to turn an informed citizenship into mindless zombies...
"The price of education is rising therefore it is a plot to subjugate the population", and you people edit this up to +5 Interesting? WTF, Slashdot!?! You people are truly as dumb as the paranoid parent post suggests....
Aside from the single data point (if it is even correct) having nothing to connect it to the conclusion, how could you even think that a single entity or cohesive group could manipulate the national educational costs effectively over a 15 year period to achieve such an end? Your conclusion is so illogical it just makes my head hurt. Your post is a perfect example of the very irrational thought you are enumerating.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The simple truth of the matter is that we can never prove it either way.
Uh, why not? There is no evidence for an omnipotent sky bully, but there is plenty of evidence just sitting around waiting for clever monkeys to notice it, suggesting a natural creation method. In odds, it's an exact 50/50 split. There either is, or is not a creator.
No, there are not 50/50 odds. There are 2 (or more) possible explanations for the creation of existence. That does not mean that they have equal probability. In fact, given existing evidence, the big bang seems about 99% likely, other scientific explanations about 1% likely, and an invisible sky ghost about 0% since there is in fact, no actual proof of its existence.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
only the stupidest Americans still believe the propaganda that the government generates about terrorism. The people who realize the government is the only perpetrator of terrorism also realize the government is the major aggressor in the realm of our cybersecurity as well.
What do they they think about cyber-terrorism?
Wait... so people are growing increasingly concerned about 'cybersecurity', yet they still use passwords like 'password' and '12345' (queue luggage jokes).
The mind boggles.
Americans don't care about terrorism and they give just around half a shit about cybersecurity? I didn't RTFA, was it a binary cybersecurity vs. terrorism survey or did it include things that people really worry about, like keeping a steady income or getting caught boning the maid?
In the latter case, I would expect cybersecurity and terrorism to rank rather low in the list of worrying things.
"No matter that there's no evidence of any actual risk, or that the only real issue is if anyone is stupid enough to actually connect such critical infrastructure to the internet".
Interesting data point: Stuxnet is a documented and well analyzed cyberattack which was designed to airgap-hop onto a nuclear facility network and destructively sabotage Uranium refinement. It succeeded. Two questions for the author: 1> Why is Stuxnet not evidence, 2> Why is disconnecting critical infrastructure from the Internet an effective defense against threats known to have crossed air gaps?
Sorry, just a little dense and need help understanding.
"no clear evidence"
Except for all the clear evidence out there. I could google, but... I'm at work, and the coffee is almost out...so time to get back shortly.
- People hooking nuclear plants up to wireless networks. Check. And successfully red-teamed.
- Petrochemical production, delivery, & refinement networks hooked up to the internet. Check. Done that one myself.
- TCP/IP on control systems isolated by VLAN on commercial airliners check.
- Water & Sewage treatment systems hooked up to the internet and hacked remotely. Check. Over a decade ago.
- Patient medical data on the internet. Check. Watched all the doctors at the hospital use what looked like PPTP. Plus all my prescriptions are managed online. And my health/medical history so the prescription/pharma company can check for interactions/complications. Integrated.
- The big east coast blackout about... (2005?) was partially caused by a control machine being part of a botnet and crashing at a very bad time.
- If it's a SCADA system, it's on the network somehow in reality. I don't care what company you work for or what policies you have. I don't care if you're a fortune 100. If you have a SCADA network that does more than dumb telemetry, you have a system somewhere with an undocumented vendor password or debugging password. Some IT guy somewhere is trying wireless because mgmt demands it. Somebody has that in a lab plugged into a router plugged into a network port. Some system somewhere has write access because a tech forgot to move a jumper or flashed an outdated firmware after the 19th hour straight in the field. It's on a middle manager's daily report somewhere to fix it, but he can't spare the unscheduled, unbillable labor until a 'checkup' in the contract next month.
Some system somewhere on your lovingly handcrafted, carefully built VPN is running software written back in 2001 that runs only on a specific version of windows XP. There's no antivirus, because it's a 15 year old machine and it's already too slow. You locked out all the field techs, but Bob in the plant plugged his kid's laptop into the extra port in the DSL modem to email his daughter in college a happy birthday message. Welcome to the botnet, comrad.
And even IF your enterprise actually has this managed, and your reports aren't...outright fictions people sign off on because that's what the low guys do to keep their job, and their managers do the same to keep their job since their bosses were once in the same spot and got promoted five years ago... most of small/medium business America is not. And you subcontract out to them for tax breaks.
It is a real threat. It is a real risk. It is a real potential liability that has actual damages in terms of both reputation, cost, and safety. The probability of exploit thus far appears to be low, because there's not much way to monetize such a hack unless you're in the military-industrial inside.
I think they should more Worry About privacy than Cybersecurity and Terrorism.
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
Weren't the exact same things going to happen with the Y2k switchover? Now how did that go again...
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny