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Destructive Hacks Strike Saudi Arabia, Posing Challenge to Trump (bloomberg.com)
State-sponsored hackers have conducted a series of destructive attacks on Saudi Arabia over the last two weeks, erasing data and wreaking havoc in the computer banks of the agency running the country's airports and hitting five additional targets, according to two people familiar with an investigation into the breach. From a report on Bloomberg: Saudi Arabia said after inquiries from Bloomberg News that "several" government agencies were targeted in attacks that came from outside the kingdom, according to state media. Although a probe by Saudi authorities is still in its early stages, the people said digital evidence suggests the attacks emanated from Iran. That could present President-elect Donald Trump with a major national security challenge as he steps into the Oval Office. The use of offensive cyber weapons by a nation is relatively rare and the scale of the latest attacks could trigger a tit-for-tat cyber war in a region where capabilities have mushroomed ever since an attack on Saudi Aramco in 2012.
He campaigned on a platform of isolationism. Why would he care if two countries on the other side of the world are hacking each other?
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I don't know if this is Slashdot trolling but these Trump articles need to stop, its getting ridiculous. A better headline would be "Saudi and Iran in cyber shitfight". Trying to shoehorn this into a Donald angle is an overreach.
The Trump connection here is lame. For one thing, it's another month and a half before Trump takes office, and this will have blown over by then. For another, it wasn't Trump who was threatening to go to war over cyber attacks - that was Clinton. But beyond that, the US doesn't have some kind of Cyber Mutual Defense treaty with KSA. This is a challenge for the king of that country - the US isn't obligated to do anything.
You don't consider large-scale state-sponsored hacking against another state to be "news for nerds"?
Question the Trump angle all you like, but the actual news here is one of the relative few stories that really does belong on Slashdot.
This should read "Posing a challenge to Obama." You know, the guy who's still President?
There's simply nothing there to concern the USA or Trump. The Saudis and the Iranians are always bickering, and neither side is even moderately civilized. When two sets of primitive stoneage barbarians bicker, there's simply no reason for civilization to intervene from over the horizon. About the most productive thing the west could do here is grab the men who lead both countries, give them sex change operations, and parachute them into some Taliban ruled areas where they could enjoy the true joys of the purity of Islam.
Sadly, the western world would need to intervene should Iran actually physically threaten the house of Saud since the world is so addicted to Saudi oil....but the Saudis have never been sufficiently decent enough for anybody to WANT to help them. If the US and its allies had more pragmatic energy policies (i.e. full energy portfolios that included oil,gas,coal,geothermal,solar,wind, etc rather than either short-sighted narrow portfolios like "all natural gas" or boutique portfolios like just wind and solar) then the whole world could just sit back and fire-up the popcorn and enjoy the barbarians slugging it out.
Nobody likes the Saudis or Iranians, who do NOTHING to become even remotely likeable....they just happen to be sitting atop one of the planet's great resources, which makes them sort of temporarily necessary evils.
US pulled stuxnet on Iran, and so has little room to lecture them on such.
Table-ized A.I.