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Government Spies Admit That Cyber Armageddon Is Unlikely
Nicola Hahn writes NSA director Mike Rogers spoke to a Senate Committee [Thursday], admonishing them that the United States should bolster its offensive cyber capabilities to deter attacks. Never mind that deterrence is problematic if you can't identify the people who attacked you. In the past a speech by a spymaster like Rogers would have been laced with hyperbolic intimations of the End Times. Indeed, for almost a decade mainstream news outlets have conveyed a litany of cyber doomsday scenarios on behalf of ostensibly credible public officials. So it's interesting to note a recent statement by the U.S. intelligence community that pours a bucket of cold water over all of this. According to government spies the likelihood of a cyber Armageddon is "remote." And this raises some unsettling questions about our ability to trust government officials and why they might be tempted to fall back on such blatant hyperbole.
because the corps won't allow it. It's bad for business, and the guys at the top are global anyway. They're all buddy buddy except for a few small fry too tiny to start anything real.
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Who are these guys?
reddit taken offline?
end. of the. fucking. world.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have not seen a single credible report that some Cyber Armageddon was likely. In addition, like many others will say, it makes NO SENSE. Anyone who knows what is going on in the world realizes that the bad guys are making so much money and gaining so much information that Cyber Armageddon would be counterproductive. And anyone who threatened to create Armageddon would be subject to the wrath of the bad guys. ITS NEVER GOING TO HAPPEN. Get back to work, people.
say anything to get elected/stay in power, backtrack asap
From TFS:
Really? REALLY? If this just NOW raises those "unsettling questions", your head has been in the sand for the last, hell, I don't know, 80 years? 100? More?
Who wrote this, some wide-eyed first-grader?
I mean, really, holy crap. Sometimes I forget the Gaussian doesn't quite flatten all the way to the left...
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
nt
We should probably be clear on what a 'cyber armageddon' is likely to be before deciding how likely it is to occur. It sounds like they've set up a classic strawman to distract Americans from the real issues surrounding information freedom and cyberspace. As usual.
Have they caught the Sony hackers yet? Or are they still pretending it is a cyber war from North Korea?
Also Stuxnet was introduced by USB infection to the device by a spy, and isn't cyberwar anything.
a cyber armageddon is super easy to avoid, all you have to do is not connect every damn machine to a network and for the ones that must be, secure them. it's quite obvious that we have the capability to find and exploit weaknesses, so why not use our knowledge and secure those few things that must be connected. we could also be prudent and require (by law) a certain level of software security for dangerous things connected to the internet (if stupid people insist on having them connected). finally, it sure wouldn't hurt if we started teaching things like how to mathematically prove a buffer wont overflow.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
You criticized hyperbole while calling government communications "gospel from on high."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You can easily distract the bulk of the population by raising fears of something they don't understand. Anything nuclear. Anything to do with computers. And so on...
The question is not "why" they do this, but what are they trying to distract you from?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Instead of cyber Armageddon there will be lots of annoying cyber sodomy.
why they might be tempted to fall back on such blatant hyperbole.
Throughout the past 50 years as corporations amassed more power to both influence and control the vote through their vested media interests and campaign finance respectively, regular constituents through a system of gerrymandering and voter ID law have become an incresingly less influential component of the american election. "government officials" are merely politicians holding office. They hyperbolize the threat of a "cyber" anything because they know it generates revenue for their real constituents and in turn campaign finance for them if they pass legislation that works toward state sponsored lemon socialism for corporations that, arguably, do very little if anything to prevent the threat of a cyber flavoured event.
sadly due to this hyperbole, theyre also required to follow their parade of pandering through wallstreet with rabbit eared pockets, with a bevvy of legislation to convince the masses that not only is the threat real, but that theyre taking it seriously. they create a sort of reality in which theyre forced to operate and in turn we get things like anti cyber bullying legislation and Aaron Schwartz. the MPAA and RIAA, large corporate sponsors in and of themselves, endorse such legislation as it serves their agenda of convincing their members theyre actually effective in policing piracy and ensuring profit for agents and talent.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Just armageddon (not the literal one, natch) through cyber means?
This reminds me of the 90's when people would prefix things with "e-" without a unified definition of the monkier. "E-mail", "E-file", etc...
If I had to guess, I'd imagine a "cyber-armageddon" as some sort of problem directly affecting logical electronic infrastructure. Imagine simultaneously wiping out all copies of DNS records everywhere (including hosts files) through some mysterious malware, blowing up a bunch of datacenters, and a Sony Pictures-like virus that hits Google and wipes out all code backups. That might be a "cyber-armageddon."
That would suck, and would cause quite a bit of culture shock (and, of course, would be a catastrophic economic event), but it would not be the End of the World.
On the other hand, an EMP attack against the United States which disables/blows most non-hardened electronic equipment and causes a quickly-cascading North American power system collapse everywhere all at once would be a *true* (figurative) armageddon. That's really what I think of when dealing with continuity of government plans and "dire threats". American society would find a way to survive without the Internet (although true, unprepared Millennials might suffer debillitating levels of shock). American society would probably *not* find a way to survive after a few months of a power and communications outage, however, at least in its current geopolitical form -- and especially if a power vaccum formed internationally. (Think "Revolution" without the hand-wavey, future-science gobbledygook.)
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According to government spies the likelihood of a cyber Armageddon is "remote." And this raises some unsettling questions about our ability to trust government officials and why they might be tempted to fall back on such blatant hyperbole.
So I am confused are we happy an official finally offered a reasonable and likely accurate description of the risks we face, and correct identification of the problem, attribution, or not?
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Some sort of, "we can't do anything about it anyway, so why think about it or talk about it?". That is how people get blindsided. Remember Mitt Romney talking about "there are this 47% we can't do anything about" (I admit what he was trying to convey was not the as bad as the media made him out to be, I am a staunch Democrat by the way). That is a classic top executive way of dealing with things. "Cant do anything about it, forget and concentrate on something we can do about".
But that is precisely where people will attack us. For an enemy of America the first question is, "What is something they can't do anything about? Let us attack there. They can't make every liberty loving American to subject themselves to strip search, gate rape. Meekly walk barefoot in front of uniformed officers? They will get flashbacks of cattle cars and nazis with folding tables snapping 'papers, please'. That for just boarding a plane to fly to Kalamazoo! come on! They cant do that. So let us hijack a plane and hit a couple of buildings."
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Cyber Armageddon? Sure it's possible and very probable. It's just that no-one's bothered to try it big scale. No-one wants to admit it either, so their only choice is to deny that it's possible.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Seriously. I don't give a fuck what the submitter's opinion is about the topic.
So it's "blatant hyperbole" that the threat of cybergeddon is remote? Doy?
We see the same ideology in ISIS as in Hitler. A desire to dispose of not only people who do not conform, but also erase history, so that we cannot be reminded of what had been. ISIS not only wants to change the present and future, but also the past. What is also happening in government such as in the US. Is a single ideology consuming and dictating direction. Obama is using Executive action to basically impose rules of law, policy and regulations without debate and compromise. This is truly a government our forefathers did not want. We don't have three branches of government for nothing. Armageddon could happen in many forms, as we have seen in 9-11 as a economy collapse out of fear, and a cyber attack could very well break communication which could cause chaos. People today are not as prepared to face hardships as those say in the great depression. Losing cell phone service could serve as a trigger for hysteria for some. Iran even though it openly wants to eliminate Jews from the face of the Earth. The US is negotiating a nuclear treaty? This to me should be a non starter until Iran erases any prophecy or belief that Jews cannot exist. Cyber Armageddon may not be what we perceive as end of World event. But it may trigger even worse things.
The computer malware is following a similar path. Some of the early viruses were so destructive. Then they got to be less destructive to survive longer. At some point the criminals started protected the computers they have infected from other malware, they reduced their load on their hosts, to survive longer, and to keep the owner fro dumping the machine for a newer one. It is possible there are uninformed computer owners whose computers anti-virus software is actually one of the malware they had picked up. So at some point we will be having these malware incorporated into our computers in some symcyberosis?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
There seems to be a presumption that these characters understood the speciousness of their claims. Much of the technology sector, and much of society, consists of the clueless being led by the marginally clued, or even just the clueless that shout the loudest. Assigning responsibility in such circumstances is often a fool's errand.
And the disturbing fact is even if there is a risk it would be childishly simple to remove that risk, just pull the network plug to the utilities and harden consumer electronics. Even if you need remote monitoring it would be easy to create equipment that would allow for unidirectional monitoring with absolutely no risk to critical systems. Instead we seem hell bent on integrating ever more insecure systems even further into our lives. And our supposed "protectors" seem content to continue this trend and even introduce new flaws into electronics in some foolhardy attempt to gain superfluous intelligence that often isn't even acted on when something nefarious is indicated.
Not a troll, it's historical fact. Ignoranuses.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The population density increased until there was a threat from all sides. People evolved to have a fear of space which allowed them to live amongst this threat. With the advent of civilization, this threat disappeared, countered by civil authority. The fear which had evolved remained, however, as it takes a long time to evolve back to fearlessness. Religions took advantage of the fear to introduce fear of eternity (time), so now religion makes up terrors of eternity, selling insurance against that, and governments make up terrorists to sell us insurance against.
So, as I read through the comments, I'm struck by the speed with which we stake out positions. Cyber armageddon (CA) vs. end of warfare? Isn't there anything in between?
You're a bunch of smart guys; I bet you could think of twenty alternatives to the either / or mentality we see so often here.
That's not the only plausible explanation. Government representatives are commonly looking to increase their authority, increase their budgets, or sometimes just increase their profile. Invoking hyperbole at every turn is a way to get the audience to act, hopefully by doing as the government rep. asks.
There was a Pentagon presentation a few years back on space war, in regards to satellites. That presentation used the term "Pearl Harbour" so often it triggered some commentary on the presentation style and language. Do you think the presenters were unaware of the emotional loading of this term? No, they wished to both invoke a shorthand for the danger they presented, but also to motivate the audience to acquiesce to their requests. In terms of funding, regulation, development and all the rest.
Hyperbole is a common sales and persuasion technique.