Russia should be disconnected from the World Wide Web unless and until technology can be developed to catch its government-supported cyber-criminals. One of these days, Putin’s agents will find a way to neutralize our nuclear deterrent, and he will extract heavy concessions from America, or worse. If we address the Russian problem, China may clean up its act to avoid a similar fate.
In October of 2016, Dyn suffered a massive DDoS attack that took down the name server resolving system for many hours and for millions of users (https://www.wired.com/2016/10/internet-outage-ddos-dns-dyn/). No motivation was ever identified, yet the attack was well-coordinated, expensive to run, and highly sophisticated.
Perhaps I am just the run-of-the mill conspiracy theorist, but at the time it seemed to me that the attack and outage would be a perfect opportunity to work in the IP delivery system under cover of chaos to insert malware into the largest servers that resolve network addresses. Even just a few minutes of Apple Pay traffic, etc... could compromise hundreds of thousands (at least) of financial accounts. Even if the latter was not the intent, this latest "intentional" network redirection could simply be a test of the possibility to mount a similar but larger and longer attack.
By quietly acquiescing to lame security requirements that still enable the most frequent password to be "123456" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/01/16/worlds-common-passwords-revealed-using/), and other sloppy practices, we have made ourselves, our families, our country, and even the world's entire economic network vulnerable. Today, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Peter Thiel is now hundreds of millions of dollars into the fantasy currency, bitcoin, itself an easily exploitable piece of software (block chains are based on a system of trust support mostly by information dispersal, rather than secure code).
Welcome to 2018. Expect more of this in the future.
Comments
Perhaps I am just the run-of-the mill conspiracy theorist, but at the time it seemed to me that the attack and outage would be a perfect opportunity to work in the IP delivery system under cover of chaos to insert malware into the largest servers that resolve network addresses. Even just a few minutes of Apple Pay traffic, etc... could compromise hundreds of thousands (at least) of financial accounts. Even if the latter was not the intent, this latest "intentional" network redirection could simply be a test of the possibility to mount a similar but larger and longer attack.
By quietly acquiescing to lame security requirements that still enable the most frequent password to be "123456" (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/01/16/worlds-common-passwords-revealed-using/), and other sloppy practices, we have made ourselves, our families, our country, and even the world's entire economic network vulnerable. Today, the Wall Street Journal revealed that Peter Thiel is now hundreds of millions of dollars into the fantasy currency, bitcoin, itself an easily exploitable piece of software (block chains are based on a system of trust support mostly by information dispersal, rather than secure code).
Welcome to 2018. Expect more of this in the future.