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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.
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
as long as the corporations are reigned in and controlled
otherwise the search for more profit by any means leads to the progressive impoverishment of the masses. at some point, a revolution occurs, the original idealists are shoved aside, and power is taken by the usual douchebags who appeal to the usual nationalist prejudices. as putin shows, nationalism demands imperial adventures to stay alive. put two major regions like that next to each other: china-russia, russia-europe, india-china, etc... and you get a major war
so corporations need to be kept on a leash and the average person has to feel secure, and you are correct: no more major wars. because corporations will pay to keep a lid on the usual pettiness that lead to pointless wars like in the past
but corporations allowed to vacuum up profit at the detriment of the common man and you get social destabilization, revolution, and then some years later a napoleon, a stalin, a mao, and all the usual mass murdering adventures that come with such assholes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
The submitter seems to complain that there were past calls of Armageddon, and that the warnings given today are less sever.
The article that they linked demonstrating past testimony by Panetta speaks of a threat of a Cyber Pearl Harbor... was that Armageddon?
The report by Mr Rogers includes this section on risks:
Risk.
Despite ever-improving network defenses, the diverse possibilities for remote hacking intrusions, supply chain operations to insert compromised hardware or software, and malevolent activities by human insiders will hold nearly all ICT systems at risk for years to come . In short, the cyber threat cannot be eliminated ; rather, cyber risk must be managed. Moreover, the risk calculus employed by some private sector entities does not adequately account for foreign cyber threats or the systemic interdependencies between different critical infrastructure sectors
I dunno, but the line, 'will hold nearly all ICT systems at risk for years to come', seems pretty dire.
I do not see what the submitter is talking about
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Well, one of the reasons of cybermageddon could be two gangs having at each other.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
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.)
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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.
Francis Fukayama, is that you?
"What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."
That's from 1992.
"[U]niversalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."??!?!
BWAAA HAAA HAA HAAA
Think ISIS agrees?
How about North Korea? China?
When are India and Pakistan finally going to come to nuclear blows?
No more wars?
That must be why the putative leader of "Western liberal [democracies]" is trying so damn hard to appease a bunch of medieval theocrats bent on obtaining nuclear weapons so they can literally "wipe Israel off the map".
Nah, that can't lead to war.
Hell, the French - the same country that helped Chamberlain try to appease Hitler then 50+ years later sold its Security Council vote to Saddam Hussein - are strongly opposed to it.
France - full of cheese eating surrender monkeys - thinks Obama is weak. And that weakness is going to lead to war.
Ouch.
No more wars?
BWAAA HAAA HAA HAA
That must be why Obama sent US troops BACK to Iraq.
Oh, you missed that?
No more war?!?!
What color is the sky on your planet?
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?
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
thank you, exactly
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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!
So it's "blatant hyperbole" that the threat of cybergeddon is remote? Doy?
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.
Not a troll, it's historical fact. Ignoranuses.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I do not believe that government is incompetent, that is simply a propaganda sound bite for people who do not want to pay taxes into the society that they live in. I find it odd that they same people complain about the intelligence services of said governments, since they would would be toothless if they were incompetent
Trade and economic co-dependence are functions of government as well as corporations
The fact that I hold an incredibly small share does not mean that I am in favor of deregulating said company because the majority share holders would certainly take advantage of me (and the rest of the small shareholders) if there was no oversight, just look at Enron
Wherever You Go, There You Are
well said
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.