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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 ----
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
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.
Let me correct that for you:
If the sensitive systems are connected to the internet (and they often are), and if standard security procedures are not followed (and they rarely are), then the risk is really quite significant.
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Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
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
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.
You can't take the power grid off the Internet. You know why? Because of (ironically) reliability. Let's look at Texas, which is governed by ERCOT. ERCOT facilitates sharing between the different power utilities, as well as energy trading. Much of this (and more in the future) is facilitated by communications about load, actual generation and available reserve generation capacity. These three numbers change more frequently, dramatically and unexpectedly than you might think. An industrial plant fires up a furnace...and whammo, suddenly a utility has 25MW of load show up out of nowhere without warning, and they have to push their boilers to produce more power to keep up. (If load and generation get out of balance, very bad things happen...but frequency regulation is a story for another time). If a plant trips because of some mishap, then suddenly a bunch of generation drops off the grid. If it's a big plant, then that utility may need to draw power from a neighbor to keep up, at least until they can restart the plant (or bring demand generators online).
Without these interconnections, the ability to respond this way greatly drops off. So it's a situation where the overall grid becomes more stable, but at the cost of providing a degree of interconnectivity that makes it more feasible for an attacker to go after it via cyber attacks. A lot is being done to manage the vulnerabilities and risks, mostly under the NERC CIP regulatory standards. There's a nugget of truth to the fearmongering, but taking it all off the Internet is not even remotely realistic.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.