You can crush a man with journalism - William Randolph Hearst
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US defence industry calls for more spending on cyber-warfare
A CYBER WARFARE EXERCISE designed by the defence industry to lobby for more cash has raised fears that the US is not ready to fight an online war.
The exercise, called "Cyber ShockWave", was held in a Washington hotel room where participants played "the President and his advisers" to observe a simulated cyber attack featuring crashed mobile networks, the slowing of web traffic to a crawl and major cities plunged into darkness.
Former president George W Bush's Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff played the role of National Security Advisor as the "cabinet" sought to respond to a "nightmare scenario" drawn up by former CIA director Michael Hayden.
The exercise was filmed by CNN and organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center to "educate the public about our vulnerabilities," said Eileen McMenamin, BPC vice president of communications.
However while it was all whizz-bang stuff, look behind the surface and it's obvious that the whole thing was just a rather elaborately staged promotional stunt.
The simulation was backed by General Dynamics, which just happens to make a fortune flogging defence hardware and security gear to the government. Military contracting giant Lockheed Martin was also involved. The airplane maker has just been given the nod to provide security gear to fight any cyber war.
Also present were L-3 Communications, JPMorgan Securities and the Aspen Institute. The BPC advisory board consists of Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, Bob Dole, and George Mitchell, who can all be politely described as long time Washington Establishment players.
The simulated cyberattack scenario depicted a supposed "Chinese" attack launched from purportedly "Russian" servers. New York, Philadelphia and Washington were plunged into darkness, airline traffic was disrupted and the financial markets were brought to a halt.
It was a classic Cold War scenario, updated for the Internet. The US defence industry did rather well out of the Cold War for about 40 years so it's fond of evoking Communist threats.
Former deputy CIA director John McLaughlin, who was bumped up to Director of National Intelligence for the cyber wargame, even rattled off a bit of nonsense about "Al-Qaeda" terrorists possibly having the ability to carry out such an attack.
With the terrorist fear card played all that has to happen now is for the US administration to panic and write a big cheque to the defence industry and the whole thing will be deemed successful. µ
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the ultimate purpose is to seize control of "teh internets".
IF any critical hardware is so "whizz-bang" high tech that it's vulnerable to remote attack, then the solution is to dumb it down. That's the Luddite way, just get rid of the possibility of problems entirely.
Just Out bit ago today:
FCC Wants High-Speed Internet for the Masses
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said in a speech that the National Broadband Plan will aim to bring 100 megabits per second Internet connections to 100 million homes across the United States.
Now dosn't that Read Sweet. National, that Is. Did ye know theINQ Stories are part of larger PR firm. Latter disclose which one.
In Oval, its Heads Up in Lead, Fast Bricie & neck 'n Neck coneing up & 'ole greely in 8th. On home Stretch, At 10 Gb/s, Newee, & STeWie Clonk IT Out. Prices Are Gonnutz, soon enuf.
Signed:Doc TOM.
More mega-bucks to the defence industry! However, perhaps they could just consider the source of nearly all cyberattacks: Microsoft Windows.
So, we could perhaps pay billions more defence dollars to Microsoft to allow them to "try" and make Windows more secure.
OR
Could Switch PC's to a more secure OS (like Linux, which more effectively separates user and system processes -- which would seem to be the cheaper option).
I guess if Microsoft were charged for the costs of all this cyber-damage, the problem might have been rectified long ago.
"With the terrorist fear card played all that has to happen now is for the US administration to panic and write a big cheque to the defence industry and the whole thing will be deemed successful."
Nick,
Writing a big cheque to the defence industry to protect against cyber episodes is a waste of money and criminal fraud on a military industrial scale and perpetrated against the military on a global scale if the conspiring company heads would be touting and pimping any Obvious Nonsense about them be Able to Providing any Cyber Security. The big cheques that Vulnerable Governments and Under Attack Administrations suffering from Systemic In-house Malware would write, are much better addressed and made out to those Individuals in the Cyber Security Know, who themselves, for Very Good Reasons of National, International and InterNetional Security and Private and Personal and even Pirate Intellectual Property Protection, would remain Unknown to All but a Few with the Need to Know the Unknown.
At least then will the Wealth doled out be easily tracked and accounted for, which will keep the pen pushers and bean counters happy, and they won't even know what they are auditing.
Let's all get on with 2nd life and have a pint.