A hilarious example of new media blowing up entirely fictional stories into a feeding frenzy which then is debunked, becomes the butt of jokes, and now lives on as a cautionary tale – in under an hour. I give you the 35-Minute John Roberts Retirement. Clearly the Feiler Faster Thesis is only getting, er, faster. Erroneous […]
The Pentagon just opened the floodgates to social networking in the military. (Wired writeup; DOD policy memo.) Given the ubiquity of Facebook today and the average age of active-duty military, this is inevitable. The increase of such technologies goes a long way to make home feel closer. A friend on a Fulbright in Bulgaria has […]
We talk a lot about cyberwar – trying to affect real-world outcomes with electronic attacks. Here’s the opposite: America’s Army, a videogame developed by the military over the past few years to serve as a recruiting and training tool, where you use computers to virtually make things go boom. Great writeup in Foreign Policy. Also […]
The White House is leading their web site with a statement from Cybersecurity don’t-call-him-a-Czar Howard Schmidt. Interestingly, there’s nothing there – except to note that the administration is declassifying large swaths of the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative. (Update: OK, so they’re more like itty bity swaths.) I find it curious that the Powers that Be […]
Cool idea to handle some of the problems with verifying that funds are being spent appropriately in a war zone written up by Wired: If an area is too dicey to send in expats, Mercy Corps sends in Afghan staff with GPS cameras — either a Nikon point-and-shoot, or a Garmin handheld GPS with built-in […]
I’m watching CNN’s coverage of the Cyber Shockwave simulated massive hack attack and will be attempting to liveblog my first event. 8:00 – Beer ready. Logged in to the blog. Let’s roll. 8:05 – Widespread uncertainty. Cellphones hacked. What’s going on? Situation appears to be a breaking story of a cyber attack over America’s smartphones […]
Quick hits of interesting stories about which I’m too lazy to blog: Poisoned PDFs are currently behind 80% of system compromises. Should web browsers trust web sites certified by a Chinese authority? Iran is shutting down Gmail. The US disapproves. Freedom to Connect, baby! China stomped a hacker training company. Picked the wrong targets or didn’t […]
Over at The Atlantic, James Fallows has a great piece on China’s military and their cyberwar chops. The first segment is an excellent overview of the state of play on the US-China military rivalry in the real world. (Synopsis: USA! USA!) Fallows then dives into his main point: that on a virtual battlefield, China has some real […]
With abstract metaphors of cybersecurity involving foreign invaders or hacker burglaries, it is easy to forget that almost all security breaches come about because of actual human mistakes made while programming software or web sites. It’s almost as if your architect, working in a slapdash manner, designed your house such that anyone could easily get […]
The NYT decided to count the ways in which China is threatened by the Intertubes these days. The piece combines the two major aspects of the Web’s foreign policy impact: online organizing as threat to authoritarian control, and cybersecurity data compromises. … While much of the rest of the world frets about Chinese cyberspying abroad, […]
Spearphishing (v): To catch or try to catch one particular VIP target in a cyberscam in an attempt to gain access to their (presumably high-value) networks and information. E.g., a cleverly-crafted Trojan Horse PDF regarding an actual event using zero-day exploits to hand over the keys to the kingdom to a nefarious agent.
Back to the NYT article on Cyberwar. William J. Lynn III was quoted as saying that modern cybersecurity is like the French Maginot Line “A fortress mentality will not work in cyber,” he said. “We cannot retreat behind a Maginot Line of firewalls. We must also keep maneuvering. If we stand still for a minute, […]
Russia does not do the overt Internet censorship that China does. That’s good. They still do plenty of stuff to interfere with the Freedom to Connect. That’s bad. The heroic Russian paper Novaya Gazeta* was just subjected to a massive DDOS that knocked their main web site off the air. Here’s their Livejournal parallel site […]
I hate to keep poking at China but… OK, that’s a lie. Their government acts like thuggish authoritarians online, and so I like poking them. Unlike equally nasty but more impoverished countries like, say, Turkmenistan, they have the cash to actually make bad stuff happen.* The government – or “patriotic” hackers – DDOSed a bunch […]