Slashdot Mirror
President Obama Wants To Prevent a Cyber Weapon 'Arms Race' (theverge.com)
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.
It's called E.M.P.
"I don't know with what weapons Cyber World War III will be fought, but Cyber World War IV will be fought with abacus and slide rule".
We must make sure other countries don't attack us, because we've created so many back doors for us to attack ourselves.
The NSA and their ilk have made us prime targets, and now we rely on begging other countries to not exploit all those vulnerabilities we've created.
This signature is false.
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.
How about if the US government (and others) spent more of the effort protecting their people instead of spying on them? As in helping its citizens to safe(r) communication and storage through technology, legislation and practices instead of letting them be susceptible to any potential enemy and letting them further into the infrastructure.
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.
The US is at a major disadvantage and their cyber security forces know it and hate it and that disadvantage will cripple them. It's not a technical one either, it's a political one and that disadvantage is lobbyists. Corrupt lobbyists paid by corrupt corporations to pay off corrupt politicians to force the purchase and installation of poor security closed source proprietary software relying on nothing more than security by obscurity. Other countries will jump ahead with more secure FOSS, basically because their cyber security forces can than directly monitor and audit that software and not just alone but in indirect association with all other governments cyber security forces. The US government will be blocked by 'no no zones' which they are not allowed to touch because profits first, those 'no no zones' will of course be touched by other countries cyber security forces, whilst those countries will be blocking the entry of closed source proprietary software, especially back doored US proprietary software and hardware. The NSA played and now the US economy pays.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen