03.19.12
Cyberweapons: Not all they’re cracked up to be
Today the Post ran a piece on development, or the lack of it, of cyberweapons by the US military. The US government still spends way more on cyberdefense.
The quote worth a box out and coming as no real surprise to blog readers:
“To affect a system, you have to have access to it, and we have not perfected the capability of reaching out and accessing a system at will that is not connected to the Internet,??? said Joel Harding, an independent consultant who is a former military officer and former director of the Information Operations Institute.
Even if an operator gains access, he said, “unless you already have custom-written code for a system, chances are we don’t have a weapon for that because each system has different software and updates.???
The reporter runs down a small list of incidents from wars in last few years which may have involved cyberweapons, all with iffy, virtually non-existent or mixed results. Almost all the sources are anonymous.
In what must be seen as progress the Gulf War printer virus April Fool’s joke is not used as one of them.
“Some experts believe that Israel may have used a cyberweapon to blind Syrian radar before bombing a suspected nuclear facility in September 2007, but several former U.S. officials say that the technique more likely used was conventional electronic warfare or radar jamming using signals emitted from an airplane,” reads the Post.
However, in many circles, belief in a magical quality for cyberweapons remains strong. It has to do with American society, and I summarized it in 2003 when writing about the longevity of belief in the Gulf War virus hoax:
[The] Gulf War virus [played] to a uniquely American trait: a child-like belief in gadgets and technology and the people who make them as answers to everything.