Slashdot Mirror
Security Companies Accused of Exaggerating Iran's Cyberthreats Against the US
An anonymous reader writes: A widely-read report accusing Iran of hundreds of thousands of cyberattacks against the U.S. is being criticized as hugely inaccurate as well as motivated by marketing and politics, according to a new whitepaper and critics around the security industry. The original report, solicited by a conservative think tank and published by Norse in the lead up to the RSA Security Conference, hit the front page of the New York Times by calling handshakes and network scans "sophisticated cyberattacks."
It's called marketing... Geeez
Candidates are being announced for the primaries and the conservative party needs a big bad strawman to wave around and claim that the current government is ignoring in order to rally their supporters.
Must have been one lousy DDOS attack, one hundred thousand hits. Cyberattacks. According to the US law each and every computer generated hit is a crime and will be prosecuted to the most aggressive interpretation of the law.
Once they where the bogeyman.
Not only security companies, but also the US government. There is a clear interest to make sure the new Cybersecurity bill will not be stopped in Congress, and they'll do anything to make it happen. Same as with the NSA massive spying they want strong laws protecting their ability to control anyone, anywhere.
Space Nutters making up threats about the Asteroid of Doom and staying on this rock? Or exaggerating the usefulness of space based solar power or mining asteroids or colonizing Mars?
That would never happen. They're super-rational programmers and therefore know everything about the physical world.
Every damn networking and Linux book - at least basic ones - always had the user ping whitehouse.gov and then traceroute as a diagnostic test.
Maybe, these cyberattacks are just folks setting up Linux?
Look at the bottom of the site. It says Slashdot is part of the DHI group. What the fuck is the DHI group? Did they buy Slashdot? Did they buy Dice? When the fuck did all this happen?
"Libtards," "Arab Pigs": OK, so we established tha.t you are a hateful bigot
And on top of that, you imply that the backwater hicks called the Macedonians "civilized" the Persians, whose culture was far more urbanized and sophisticated: you are an idiot, too!
Keep up the good work making Greeks look good!
If you think Irans "cyber" threat is exaggerated, try their actual threat. After failing to overthrow the regional government, the US has maintained a 50 year sore-spot for the rising middle eastern power that borders on the definition of angry playground bully. We gin up our animosity for the country with occasional mistranslations from the shah, fervent warmongering from Iran, and our own latent islamophobia. the reason you havent heard much saber rattling from the US lately is because after two government shutdowns, a massive recession, and two failed wars we're basically relegated to observer status in foreign politics. Sure, we'll hustle a drone across some parched desert country like yemen occasionally but the recent treaties brokered between Iran and the US betray the fact that we either participate willingly in some form of diplomatic process on their terms, or they ignore us from any process in the future with impunity.
For vendors to bark up the cyber tree though? It might have worked 10 years ago for sure but now its a riskier gamble. Most people have forgotten the islamic republic single handedly and quite easily captured our most sophisticated drone. Perhaps the future threat is credible, that Iran would seek revenge for our Stuxnet attack on their nuclear research SCADA controllers, but thats predicated on the faulty logic that Iran would operate on a petty tit-for-tat foreign policy akin to the one the US has subscribed to for 40 years. Instead of feeding the trolls, Iran appears to just be focusing on nuclear power and something far more dangerous to the US than a nuclear bomb: Economic and energy independence. Building your own reactor fuel means you can power your cities outside your oil revenue and without having to purchase fuel from other countries. Everything from desalination to medical and industrial power now comes without the added caveat "with $foreign_nation assistance" and that means the US finds itself in the back seat the next time the middle east needs a desalination plant or X-Ray isotope. And it works as well as an ICBM as a deterrent, knowing the peaceful enrichment can rapidly turn into nuclear weapons if, say, another nation comes to overthrow your government again.
Good people go to bed earlier.
that cyberattacks came from a country whose leaders yell "Death to America"?
Persians (a.k.a. Iranians) are much better than Arabs (i.e., Islamic pigs)!
That's not saying much.
Somebody trying to sell you something may have exaggerated your need for said item? Really? I almost don't believe it.
And your reply said a lot - namely that you are a tiny-minded, scared bigot. Bravo.
Did you know that almost every attack which appear to come from China and Iran actually come from a small Norwegian village called Hell? I can prove it by giving some campaign contributions to a random congress person who also gets money from the US oil industry.
Yep, it's the little kid who cried WOLF so many times that when a real wolfy threat occurred, no one would listen to them.
I'm all for accurate information not driven by hype/politics/marketing, but the state of U.S. cybersecurity is pretty dismal. Whatever you want to believe about the number and sophistication of the attacks, the preparedness in both the private and public sectors has a long way to go.
These people are just trying to sell you another war folks. They don't give a shit about the security of the internet.