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Comment by wahsd | Hacker News Reader

With the DoD funded tactical cryptology research centers being opened at Camp Williams, UT and outside of Augusta, GA; nothing is safe anymore

This should be considered one of those watershed moments of humanity. Once again, some madmen have far more technology and power than intellect. The last time this happened, industrialized warfare led to the two world wars and a cold war that threatened us with absolute and complete destruction.

I have a feeling that this event will strike alarm bells around the world as nations race to arm themselves with the weapons of electronic warfare and destruction.

Talk about terrorism; we really need to be absolutely certain that when we go around brandishing our threats around the world from now on, we are not threatening someone that can shut down our infrastructure, or even turn our systems against us.

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Just because it hadn't been knowingly done before now, doesn't mean it wasn't already a threat from state sponsors (or others). This was just a step towards an end that we all could foresee, be it from China, Russia, the U.S., or others. If the U.S. (assumption) hadn't done this, I can't imagine this sort of weapon hadn't already been envisioned by other states. It was only a matter of time.

Now that its on the surface, people (including governments) can understand its real, and have no excuse to not give it the attention that it deserves by instituting procedures and designs to properly protect critical systems.

I disagree. Experts have understood the true risk of a cyber war for over a decade, at least. The infrastructure of the United States, both public and private, is woefully unprepared for such attacks to be brought against it.

I'm reminded of a recent quote describing how getting stuxnet into Iran may have been difficult, but getting something into a US power plant would be trivially simple by comparison.

Not only is the US infrastructure not ready, but it looks like no one is actively trying to change that.

I imagine that businesses won't see the need to waste all the money until something big happens and they're forced to.

"Not only is the US infrastructure not ready, but it looks like no one is actively trying to change that."

Really? I know it's controversial, but that's pretty much what CISPA is supposed to help with.

[edit: Unclear language.]

Yeah, but come on, everyone knows how counterproductive this is.

Flame and Stuxnet have been rumored to have been US/Israeli sponsored for a while; the confirmation is no real surprise.

What surprises me is how stupid this shit is. I mean seriously? If I knew the US was using crypto warfare leveraging the spreading properties of a virus, I would hope that it would be nearly impossible to tie back to us. I mean that's just fucking common sense.

I mean really, at the end of the day, what did this achieve? I'd say it probably just gave every crypto nerd in China, Japan, India and Russia an infinite budget.

" … as nations race to arm themselves with the weapons of electronic warfare and destruction."

I, for one, welcome our new Military-developer Complex Overlords.

Slightly more seriously - I'd see a race for more and more complex military/attack software as an improvement over the _previous_ "arms race". Shutting down or controlling or destroying SCADA systems would be _bad_ and could very credibly lead to people dying - but several orders of magnitude less than the old city-sized smoking glass craters option.

(And from a personal mercenary perspective, even though I would choose to not work as part of a Military-developer Complex, having that as a source of practically-infinitely-funded competition for developer talent in the market would still put upward pressure on pricing for even "conscientious objector" developers)

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