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Comment by fnovd | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see even people on this site downplaying how worrisome these attacks are.

The ability to shut down an enemy's computer systems remotely is an awesome power, and will only become more impactful as we rely more and more on computer systems in our everyday lives.

Forget space: the internet is the next frontier. A group of enemy soldiers shutting down a hospital would be met with outrage and military backlash. A group of hackers shutting down fifty hospitals is met with jokes about outdated operating systems and derision towards IT directors.

At what point do we stop treating these like annoyances of a strange new world and start treating them like what they are: targeted, military-grade attacks. The whole world can see how woefully unprepared the West is for attacks of this nature and the attackers are only going to grow more bold.

The more intertwined tech is with the military, the more powerful the cyber-warfare paradigm becomes.

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A thing you two aren't considering is the that US and the UK are the world leaders on the offensive side of this same technology, "we" just do a (slightly) better job of keeping this stuff contained. Raytheon, BAE, etc. all have cyber weapons development divisions and obviously GCHQ and NSA do their own internal development. The west's policy of "proportional response" will apply to cyber attacks as well.

Not that this is an excuse for having unpatched systems or not designing for the catastrophe scenario, but we should remember that this is a two-way street.

>A thing you two aren't considering is the that US and the UK are the world leaders on the offensive side of this same technology

Exactly, on the offensive side. I'm not particularly concerned about our ability to retaliate proportionally.

But what good is a deterrent if it fails to deter attackers? Our defensive capabilities are clearly lacking, as these past few attacks have shown.

> A group of enemy soldiers shutting down a hospital would be met with outrage and military backlash. A group of hackers shutting down fifty hospitals is met with jokes about outdated operating systems and derision towards IT directors.

The problem with this analogy is that, while an attack by a group of enemy soldiers is easily attributable to a specific nation, cyberattacks can be carried out by pretty much anyone; and it's not easy to say with confidence that a specific government organization orchestrated the attack.

I'd be more inclined to compare this to a terrorist attack at an airport carried out by someone who managed to get a homemade bomb past security by simply slipping by while no one was looking. Outrageous, sure, but not necessarily easy to attribute to a specific nation, and probably preventable had security measures not been wholly inadequate.

"Outrageous, sure, but not necessarily easy to attribute to a specific nation"

That won't stop governments, "security experts", and the media from attributing it to specific nations anyway.

If only stopping soldiers with assault rifles would be as easy as keeping the doors closed.

I get a lot of equipment can't be updated because of certification, but it's been obvious since the early 2000s these things should operate on hardened and isolated networks.

The sad thing is that such consequences have been foreseen for decades, but few people or companies have taken them very seriously.

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