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Cyberwar Skeptic
by Andrew McCaskey
Wednesday, 08 April 2009 22:40
It’s OverStated, for Effect
I love a good political / technical conspiracy as much as anyone, but I have the sneaking feeling that the combined stories of power and utility grid hacking released within a day or two from the Wall Street Journal, Wired, multiple newspapers and the military are a ramp up for some budget discussions next week, rather than a new revelation. Vulnerabilities have always existed, as have the desire of enemies to exploit those openings to their own ends.
The “Sleeper Cell” attack vector has been an entertaining staple of fiction for at least fifty years. Only in this scenario, it is some bit of obscure code planted in a vulnerable piece of switchgear, routing, or load-shedding equipment awaiting the call of the evil genius in time of war or crisis or blackmail.
Countermeasures are, of course, not discussed. Nor should they be. However, I’d like to think that the problem is not as concentrated and evil as the popular press (driving a political agenda) might lead you to believe. It’s much like the discussion of encryption: Statements like ” There is less than one chance in 10 e24 of the code being broken” leads you to the brute force approach that takes one solution, tries it , fails ,discards and then concludes only 10e24 minus one to go. In practice, cracking such a code depends upon algortihms that eliminate millions of combinations at a time, not one at a time.
I expect that if millions of remote reading electrical meters are affected that there are some changes and countermeasures that once in place will nullify their effect by hundreds of thousands of millions – not just one at a time. And a lot of unintended consequences, human error and just plain bad luck that could take a lot of nodes offline.
If you are a foreign power investing efforts into a widely dispersed network of potential disruptive code, you’d probably like to test it. That would increase your chances of detection.
All told, the threat of cyberwar – and the need for immediate action might need to be taken with a few grains of salt.
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