Based on what he knows of Stuxnet, Mr. Lewis said, the United States is “one of four or five places that could have done it — the Israelis, the British and the Americans are the prime suspects, then the French and Germans, and you can’t rule out the Russians and the Chinese.”Not bad company to be in, huh? Israelycool has additional speculations on the matter.
No matter who did it, it must be said that the whole cyber-warfare thing is a bit unsettling. If this is what early generations of it can do, think what will be possible once the warriors really get into stride.
3 comments:
I recently heard a long talk with somebody from German Federal Police on it. From that I gathered that the field of cyber attacks has long evolved into an industry with lots of subcontractors supplying the parts i.e. no single genius or even a single government department is any longer capable of coming up with anything single-handedly.
There is a lot of infrastructure and a lot of legal or at least 3 monkey-style legal players.
If there are still people and/or units who know enough to assemble parts from here, there and elsewhere into serviceable somethings without outside knowledge of what they were after then that can't be much longer.
What will happen if open cyber warfare should break out? Hopefully there'll be enough candles on sale and I'll have enough books I enjoy re-reading.
Silke
It's far worse than anyone knows Yaacov, for example it's no coincidence that China's meteoric rise as an economic power has coincided with the uptake of the internet by the western world. They've stolen every technological secret they have... all from hacking into other country's networks.
Iran is quite capable of creating a stuxnet, there's nothing particularly difficult about it that type of thing just requires lots of time & skilled programmers... something countries like Iran, Nth Korea & China etc have in abundance. There's a white mans arrogance in the west; a view that only westerners can create complex computer programs. It's dangerous thinking.
The time may come when people look back and conclude that the biggest threat to the western way of life was Microsoft Windows. (and I say that from the perspective of an IT professional who understands security)
Cheers, Gavin
Gavin
for some things they didn't need "hacking" - they got it served on a silver platter.
Long ago when that German super fast train had finally gotten an order to build a first in China there were engineers from the GErman construction company on German radio complaining that they were forced by the Chinese with their German bosses concurring to hand over, demonstrate, teach vital inventions to the Chinese.
A few days ago there was a piece in the NYT? much amazed that the Chinese are competing with Western companies over prices for these kind of trains on the world market. They seem not to be quite there yet but only by a bit.
The piece said they arrived at it much faster than Westerners expected.
I remember well the times when it was said that Japanese could only imitate, nobody is saying that anymore which makes me wonder why they make themselves believe the same thing about China and this time around at least at my level in the hierarchy they were perfectly aware of what was going on and they didn't make the mistake of underestimating their Chinese counterparts.
and yes I hope that I'll be thru with my life in a comfortable and peaceful way before all that computer hubris hits the fan. The "crisis" may have been a first warning shot - to the best of my knowledge to date still nobody knows how or whether computers got the market "flash crash" of May 6 going.
Silke
Post a Comment