08.09.12

The rigged game — Iranians are attacking!

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle, Cyberterrorism at 9:14 am by George Smith

Now that Cybersecurity 2012 has failed — it deserved the fate — there’s not much point in the big gun lobbyists for it to continue the sales pitch.

Which means NSA director Keith Alexander has, for a moment, disappeared. There’s no immediate need for more scamming.

Which shows you the nature of the rigging. The financial system could be attacked. The water could be made something bad. The electricity turned off! But they failed to get what they wanted so it’ll wait until next time.

Nevertheless, PBS recently covered it, painting the failure to arrive at legislation a national tragedy, putting everyone at risk.

Stolen quote:

MARGARET WARNER: Joel Brenner, welcome.

So how serious are the threats to America’s infrastructure? How easy would it be to take down one critical element, water supplies, electricity grid?

JOEL BRENNER, author, “America the Vulnerable”: We have seen a real spike in the attacks on the industrial control systems that run a lot of these — this infrastructure. When DHS began keeping…

MARGARET WARNER: Department of Homeland Security.

JOEL BRENNER: …Department of Homeland Security began keeping figures on this in 2009, there were four such attacks. Last year, there were 198. The numbers are pretty — they really tell the story.

MARGARET WARNER: And how many have actually — how many times have elements been penetrated?

JOEL BRENNER: I’m talking about attacks that really in many cases get in.

And, you know, there are different levels of penetration, and I’m — but I’m not talking just about pings on — knocks on the door. I’m talking about more significant, concerted attempts to get into infrastructure. And we have seen it in water supply stuff, as well as in electricity.

MARGARET WARNER: And who are the major — major perpetrators?

JOEL BRENNER: We — I can say what has been publicly disclosed is that a number of people in the intelligence business have seen the Iranian, the Chinese and the Russians inside of some of our critical systems, and we know the Iranians are trying …

Everything we do, including the air conditioning in this building and the switches on the subway systems in every major city, are reachable through the Internet. It’s very dangerous.

No, not the air-conditioning! It’s been triple digits in Pasadena the last three days!

Here’s Joel Brenner’s book pitch page.

Readers will note it takes some quality of sophisticated mendacity most of us lack to be the flunky on television telling viewers Iranians are attacking the US in cyberspace when the overriding news stories have been about our government-written viruses dispatched for work in Iran.

And, the classic example of an obviously planted question, alleged to be from a random member of the hoi polloi:

MARGARET WARNER: We did get some emails, email questions from viewers.

Kathryn Creedy of Melbourne, Florida, said, “Reports are that most companies are ignoring the significant threat of cyber-attacks or at least have it on the back burner, owing to costs.” She said, “I find this shocking, since it’s their fiduciary responsibility to protect the stakeholders of any organization, employees, customers and shareholders.”

Fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, huh? Yeah, that’s something a legitimate man or woman in the street would ask. For sure.

Media rigging on the cybersecurity beat is usually obvious. But the PBS piece goes just a little bit above and beyond.

Book pimpin’.

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