04.23.12
Mighty Cyberwarriors (afternoon edition)
From the wire, they can turn off the country with a twitch of their smart phones:
A few taps on his tablet computer and Justin Roberts sends a pair of trains loaded with hazardous materials on a collision course.
Or forces a nuclear plant into meltdown. Or shuts down the power grid for the entire Eastern Seaboard.
OK, the University of Nebraska at Omaha senior is really just sending malicious signals to a series of computerized controllers along the wall of a university lab, turning their winking lights from green to red.
But it’s through such exercises that students at the Nebraska University Center for Information Assurance examine how terrorists, hostile countries or simply bored hackers could inflict massive damage by infiltrating the nation’s critical infrastructure systems.
“In here, it’s just lights, but when you think about how many things that could be connected to … rail systems, water treatment centers, traffic control stations …,” said grad student Casey Glatter. “(It’s) the idea of him sending a single message to a single one of these devices, but causing a catastrophic failure.”
The school is creating defenders to join the cyberwar’s front lines …
Such iconoclasts, they wear team green shirts. (Follow the link.)
And where will one of the cyberwarriors be on the front lines?
[Student] Tory Cullen … is joining Facebook.
Lots of critical national infrastructure to secure there.
One of them used to steal cable tv, the Omaha newspaper reports. It is held up as a measure of cleverness. Not to worry, now he pays for it, readers are assured.
A professor of the University of Nebraska in Omaha tells us the digital
apocalypse can be visited upon us from “a cave.” So it would seem good they don’t read the Omaha newspaper in the dirt piles of northern Pakistan or the sandy waste of Yemen, or we’d be fucked:
You might imagine a terrorist with a bomb that is set to take out the power grid, but Mahoney said all someone has to do is figure out the correct substations to hack into, and they could cause the system to go down like a line of dominoes.
“You hack into New York, and it trickles all the way west from there,” he said. “You don’t even have to leave your cave. … It’s cost-effective terrorism.”
Cost-effective salesmanship, more likely.
We passed the French as world champion braggarts a couple decades ago and never looked back, I hear.