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President Obama Wants To Prevent a Cyber Weapon 'Arms Race' (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the let-there-be-peace dept.

An anonymous reader writes:During an address to reporters at the G-20 international summit in China, President Obama stated that he'd like to prevent an "arms race" among countries that have various cyber weapons at their disposal. The remarks come after Russian president Vladimir Putin denied having any involvement with the hack of the Democratic National Committee's emails earlier this summer. Obama said that the world is "moving into a new era where a number of countries have significant capacities", before noting that the United States has "more capacity than anybody, both offensively and defensively" when it comes to cyber weapons.

6 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Cyberweapon arms race negated by older tech? by bagboy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's called E.M.P.

  2. So, stop by XXongo · · Score: 3, Interesting
    If we don't want to be vulnerable to cyber warfare, then maybe we shouldn't race to put every single object in our house and every single piece of our critical infrastructure on the internet, then.

    It will only get worse with robotic self-driving cars and robotic everything else.

    1. Re:So, stop by yuriklastalov · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But then how will Silicon Valley spy on every man, woman, and child and funnel the data to the NSA? Won't somebody think of the Tech Sector Espionage Complex?!?!?

  3. Prevent? by onyxruby · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That train left year ago. He's delusional if he thinks a race is even an option. The US is years behind and isn't even in the running. Hell we've just started to realize this is something we ought to /start/ training professionals for. We've still got people trying to outlaw security tools.

    http://breakingdefense.com/201...
    http://blog.hackerrank.com/whi...
    http://www.techinsider.io/nort...
    http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/he...
    http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/...

    We're years behind the competition, where professionals have been getting trained and put to work for many years. We're just getting to the point of having courses in hacking, never mind college degree based level training. How the hell are we going to enter a race when only a handful of three letter agencies even have professional hackers in their employ? This isn't the kind of thing your going to call up your local friendly pen-test company for. You can't win a race you refuse to enter.

  4. Re:Out of his depth by ArmoredDragon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Obama was a law professor? I thought he was a community organizer?

    At any rate, there's nothing he or anybody else can do to "stop" a cyberweapons arms race. It's pretty damn easy to deploy a cyberweapon without in any way leaving a trace as to where it came from. Besides, it's probably best to let it proceed anyways that way we can learn from security issues (like the upcoming IoT security nightmare) before we get too entrenched in it and suddenly somebody decides to create something worse than stuxnet...Speak of which, I wonder what Obama's comments on that would be, given that he likely authorized its deployment.

  5. Re:Out of his depth by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Besides, it's probably best to let it proceed anyways that way we can learn from security issues (like the upcoming IoT security nightmare)

    Indeed. We should look at cyberwar offensives as free penetration testing. Most arms-races are lose-lose. But the defensive side of cyberwar leads to secure systems, and greater privacy. Instead of pleading with the Russians and Chinese to refrain out of the goodness of their hearts, we should look at this as an opportunity to adopt pervasive end-to-end encryption, and stop social engineering exploits by getting humans out of the loop.