Wednesday, April 21, 2010
On cyberwarfare
I have blogged from time to time about the prospect of a cyberwar attack on the very vulnerable American communications system, which happens to include such little extras as the electric grid. So add this to the must-read list: Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It. It's not just malicious hackers, either, such as destabilized Ukraine shortly before the Russians invaded. Much of our computer hardware is built in China. It would be no great feat, the authors argue, for the builders to insert a "trapdoor" enabling someone (the People's Liberation Army, for example) to take over the computer at a time of its choosing. The result could be as devastating as a nuclear bomb--and no way of knowing where the attack came from. (And given the dependence of the U.S. military on "network-centric" warfare, perhaps no way of retaliating even if we did know.) Is this absurd? Perhaps not: the authors argue, for example, that the Israelis succeeded in taking over the Syrian air-defense system in 2007, thus clearing the way for their planes to destroy the secret nuclear reactor built by the North Koreans. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
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