Hackers seem to be the new "top threat to national secu

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I was reading this article ( http://news.yahoo.com/local-police-grap ... 4AFUPQtDMD ) earlier and came across a statement from the Obama Administration that said that hackers are the new threat to "national security". A Google search lead me to the following: http://mashable.com/2012/03/02/fbi-hackers-terrorists/

This is rather alarming, the enemy of the FBI and US government has changed from older Italian guys to religious extremists to anyone that knows a thing or two about how the internet works. Is this the way they are going to justify controlling the internet? Who is the next enemy? The dissent?

Probably.

I fail to see why this is surprising.

A vast amount of activities in modern society is based on information technology in general, and the Internet in particular. Take down these institutions, and you can inflict massive damage on society..

Example: There was recently a (short-lived) DDOS hacker attack in Denmark which compromised both on-line banking and communication between citizens and public authorities. If such an attack could be sustained for longer periods of time, it could be seriously detrimental to the country and economy.

Except it can't be. A DDoS attack can only last as long as it takes for the ISPs to get together on a conference bridge and shut it down. And we're not even talking about hundreds of them - just the 10-12 tier 1 providers. Any attack that is significant enough to do economic damage on a national level will be quashed in a couple of hours.

First it was the Commies and the Fellow Travelers.

Now it is the Hackers.

ruveyn

Point taken. But DDoS isn't the only tool available to hackers.

The ILOVEYOU worm caused economic damage in the range of ten of billions USD, and Stuxnet was apparently able to cause disruption to the Iranian nuclear programme...

Very much doubt that - those figures are always very inflated



Stuxnet was also the product of the US and Israeli governments, with input from the company that manufactured the control systems for the Iranian government.

Not saying that there aren't vulnerabilities that could be exploited to cause great harm - but to suggest that the same people who are going around launching DDoS attacks are also the US' number 1 threat is a bit naive.

... If you have a better estimate, then by all means... provide...


... And this disproves my point... how?


I never claimed that these were the same people, so I fail to see the naivety.

Did you actually read the articles that are the subject of this thread? Because both of them did.

Last time I checked, the first article in the OP made no reference to DDos, Dos or Denial Of Service. The second article had a single tongue-in-cheek opening statement "Could Anonymous be the next al-Qaeda?" which is most likely a DDos reference... Other than that, both articles dealt with more serious threats...

The second article was entirely about the challenges local law enforcement face tracking small-time Identity Theft. Saying that is a threat to national security is tantamount to saying that pickpockets are a threat to national security. But, of course, the article throws up the "national security" flag, just because.

The first article fails to make any distinction whatsoever between organized cyberwarfare attacks by government powers (which is what the administration and FBI are talking about as threats to national security), and Anonymous, lulzsec, organized ID theft rings, and other "hackers" - who pose about as much a threat to the US as a fly to a bazooka.

It's patently misleading, and extremely bad journalism.

I don't know at least hackers aren't drone bombing people, I wouldn't be disappointed if there was a hacking that f***d up the system to be honest...but I can see why the government might feel threatened by that.

Actually I think it makes some sense, I remember reading about a group of people hacking the CERN; who knows what would they have been able to do if they had been of the black hat kind. Whether it is the #1 threat is debatable, but in our increasingly digital society I see the potential for hackers to do serious harm if they really put their minds on it. The people who did Stuxnet, although government backed, could still be classified as hackers, and the US and Israel are not the only ones who can put together a cyberwarfare team.

No, they hacked a public-facing website. There's a world of difference between that and taking control of the LHC.



But the problem is that everyone is associating the words of the Obama administration, centered around cyberwarfare, with the same people that are stealing credit card info and defacing websites. They are not, in any sense, the same thing.

There is a lot of sad, teenage angst, in some cases a teenager stuck in a 40 year old body.


Most of them aren't as skillful as all that, they are script kiddies who use software they didn't even write, that is easily downloaded to conduct denial of service attacks. In some case it is better distributed tha average, but again it is little effort on their part.

Many of these seem to think that hacking a public information site, is the same, as hacking the organization's private networks.


Where the problem lies is the state funded hacking, and also some criminal elements, that are finding some skilled people to commit financial crime. I'm talking more sophisticated than you 419 scam.


The real issue, is you cannot get people in Russia or China. You just have to deal with the impact, and try the best mitigate.

Hacking the website of the FBI is the equivalent of painting graffiti in the front of their building, that I know Embarrassing, but little more than that

Yes, I mean proper cyberwarfare here. Even the largest DDoS attacks, which happened rather recently (spammers vs Spamhaus) can be handled with the proper tools. Still... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_AntiSec

Some of the stuff there is fairly innocuous, but some others sound at least like a medium risk for the U.S. government, like public release of personal information of people associated with it. I don't think they really want to screw it over though, so that's something.