Instead of prosecuting elite computer hackers, the US government should recruit them to launch cyber-attacks against Islamist terrorists and other foes, according to a leading military thinker and government adviser.
The brilliance of hacking experts could be put to use on behalf of the US in the same way as German rocket scientists were enlisted after the second world war, said John Arquilla, a professor of defence analysis at the US Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in an interview with the Guardian.
He said that the US had fallen behind in the cyber race and needed to set up a “new Bletchley Park” of computer whizzes and codecrackers to detect, track and disrupt enemy networks. “If this was being done, the war on terror would be over,” he said …
Many dabbled in illegal or questionable acts but the US, he noted, had turned Wernher von Braun, Hitler’s top scientist, into an American hero after putting him to work on US rockets and space programmes.
Would you want to sit in a course by a fellow who actually makes such a comparison with a straight face?
Rhetorical. It would be fun to sit in back and hoot, though.
Anyhoo, it’s just a little bit difficult for our limited mind to see similarities between the guy who used concentration camp slave labor in WWII to build his V2 rockets to bombard London, the chief architect of the Saturn V and — “hackers.”
Standards for the technical help have been so watered-down.
Some have harsh words for this man of renown
But some think our attitude should be one of gratitude
Like the widows and cripples in old London town
Who owe their large pensions to Wernher von Braun!
Note: To my knowledge, no hackers have ever employed concentration camp labor or launched ballistic missiles at one of the biggest cities in the world.
On a single day this month here, a US Airways regional jet became stuck in asphalt that had softened in 100-degree temperatures, and a subway train derailed after the heat stretched the track so far that it kinked — inserting a sharp angle into a stretch that was supposed to be straight. In East Texas, heat and drought have had a startling effect on the clay-rich soils under highways, which “just shrink like crazy,??? leading to “horrendous cracking,??? said Tom Scullion, senior research engineer with the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M University. In Northeastern and Midwestern states, he said, unusually high heat is causing highway sections to expand beyond their design limits, press against each other and “pop up,??? creating jarring and even hazardous speed bumps.
Excessive warmth and dryness are threatening other parts of the grid as well. In the Chicago area, a twin-unit nuclear plant had to get special permission to keep operating this month because the pond it uses for cooling water rose to 102 degrees; its license to operate allows it to go only to 100. According to the Midwest Independent System Operator, the grid operator for the region, a different power plant had had to shut because the body of water from which it draws its cooling water had dropped so low that the intake pipe became high and dry; another had to cut back generation because cooling water was too warm.
Nature, global warming — or hackers and armies of Chinese cyberwarriors just raring to bring down the nation through Internet attacks on the “infrastructure”?
National security experts with tunnel vision — priceless.
Iranian nuclear facilities have been struck by a musical cyber virus, according to an e-mail believed to have been sent by an Iranian scientist to a Finnish digital security firm.
Mikko Hypponen, a chief researcher at the F-Secure firm, posted the e-mail on the company’s blog. According to the message, the Natanz and Fordo nuclear facilities have been hit with the virus, which plays the heavy metal song “Thunderstruck,” by AC/DC …
Other than playing songs, the malware has shut down computer systems and disabled Siemens hardware.
Viruses which play music randomly for the annoyance of it aren’t new.
Since the cat is out of the bag on who is writing and spreading computer viruses in Iran, there’s no actual incentive not to do these kinds of things. In fact, a DD Blog No-Prize for the first reader who spies a story in which a pundit or expert congratulates our men on the psychological brilliance and audacity of it.
The president’s opinion piece, placed on an editorial page usually hostile to his administration, was aimed at Senate Republicans who had opposed an earlier version of the bill on the grounds that it would create a new regulatory bureaucracy …
Meeting stiff opposition from conservatives, the bill in its original form could not garner the 60 votes needed to break a Senate filibuster. So yesterday (July 19), Lieberman introduced a watered-down version of the bill that removes the mandatory provisions and instead makes compliance with new cybersecurity standards voluntary.
The revision offers inducements for companies that choose to comply, such as protection from liability relating to a security incident …
Digital security experts are divided over whether the bill is necessary, and even whether the dramatic scenes depicted by Obama in his opinion piece are even possible ..
“Has a major attack happened? No,” said Steve Santorelli, a security researcher at Team Cymru in Lake Mary, Fla., who’s worked in the past for Microsoft and Scotland Yard. “Are they scanning and exploring? Almost certainly someone is, but it’s not clear exactly who or why.”
“There’s going to be an attack on specific trains loaded with what just happen to be specifically dangerous chemicals so that it or they jump the rails and cause a catastrophe?” asked George Smith, an expert on national-security technology at GlobalSecurity.org in Washington. “This belongs strictly to the last ‘Die Hard’ movie.”
“They could have run a simulation based on the plot of ‘Independence Day,'” said Julian Sanchez, a research fellow specializing in technology at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington. “That would not be a ‘sobering reminder’ that alien invasion is ‘one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face.'”
“There is little to zero evidence reservoirs and water systems can be significantly damaged by cyberattack, even if one grants the minor possibility of remote trifling with pumping systems,” Smith said. “Water purification and supply is a nationally distributed matter. There is no way to universally degrade it in the United States.”
A number of people were cited on what manipulation through SCADA might be able to do. The arguments remain the same.
Because something is vulnerable, often just potentially so, everything is vulnerable everywhere. And we have a peeping Tom at my apartment building so just think if he were at your place and became more ambitious, wanting to get into your rooms!
Because something, read everything, is computerized, and it is so easy to act maliciously through the net, everything is at risk.
Often the concerns are sincere. Often many are simply manipulative, too. We can agree it is good to always be mindful of security. However, there was a point, one we’re now past, when the story-telling turned abusive and strained.
Example:
Despite the fact that the facility’s computers were not connected to the Internet, Stuxnet got in and changed the software on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) operating uranium-processing centrifuges, causing them to spin out of control and setting back the Iranian nuclear program by more than a year.
“Many of the fundamental problems are caused by software vulnerabilities in PLCs that are impossible to fix,” Santorelli said. “They were never designed to be secure because the folks that developed them, like everyone else, never really saw this threat coming when the systems were built a generation ago,
“It’s sobering to think that the same PLCs that Stuxnet attacked are also in the rides that we take our kids to in theme parks every weekend,” Santorelli added.
So because a complex computer virus the US government developed and sent into the world, children at Disney’s and Dorney’s through the US are menaced by stuff our many anonymous enemies might make.
Security hawk arguments always work the same way.
Because we have done something, or can do something, and insist that it is trivial to duplicate, everyone else can and will do it to us. And the consequences will always be worse. All that is man-made is eventually vulnerable will be attacked.
Last month I convened an emergency meeting of my cabinet and top homeland security, intelligence and defense officials. Across the country trains had derailed, including one carrying industrial chemicals that exploded into a toxic cloud. Water treatment plants in several states had shut down, contaminating drinking water and causing Americans to fall ill.
Our nation, it appeared, was under cyber attack. Unknown hackers, perhaps a world away, had inserted malicious software into the computer networks of private-sector companies that operate most of our transportation, water and other critical infrastructure systems …
It doesn’t take much to imagine the consequences of a successful cyber attack. In a future conflict, an adversary unable to match our military supremacy on the battlefield might seek to exploit our computer vulnerabilities here at home. Taking down vital banking systems could trigger a financial crisis. The lack of clean water or functioning hospitals could spark a public health emergency. And as we’ve seen in past blackouts, the loss of electricity can bring businesses, cities and entire regions to a standstill …
For the sake of our national and economic security, I urge the Senate to pass the Cybersecurity Act of 2012 and Congress to send me comprehensive legislation so I can sign it into law.
It’s time to strengthen our defenses against this growing danger.
Nothing new in the lede graphs, the President resorting to the stock scary cyber-wargaming and scenario-concoction the US national security apparatus has delivered since … always.
Historically, the meme is invariant, delivering news that everything is vulnerable. The entire nation falls over from surprise cyberattack.
First, let’s deal with the alleged coordinated attack on trains, one which causes them to jump the tracks, releasing toxic chemicals everywhere.
If you think about this a little it falls apart,
The US has a rail system, like all countries, and mistakes happen occasionally. These cause accidents and derailments.
And throughout the nation there are lights on the tracks that signal switches open and closed, and warning and so on. Plus there are controllers. Plus people who react immediately to side-strep or remedy problems.
There is not one master switch for all rail, hubs are scattered all across the US, thousands of them, I imagine.
So, with one sentence, you are asked to belive there’s going to be an attack on specific trains loaded with what just happen to be specifically dangerous chemicals so that it or they jump the rails and cause a national catastrophe?
The intelligence requirements just to start thinking about that are beyond belief. This belongs strictly to the last Die Hard movie, the one where the fired Pentagon security contractor battles McClain.
“Trigger the accidents and the release of the poison gases now!” cackled the fiend from deep within his cyber-bunker, somewhere in the eastern hemisphere.
So shame on President Obama or, more likely, a staffer for putting it in. So the occasional bad rail accident from normal human error will remain more likely than hack or cyberwar attacks on the same.
The presumption that this has changed, or is about to, is senseless.
To make another counterpoint, there is little to zero evidence reservoirs and water systems can be significantly damaged by cyberattack, even if one grants the minor possibility of remote trifling with pumping systems.
The hazard posed to water supplies was worked out early in the war on terror, motivated by fears of chemical and biological terrorism aimed at them.
Water is difficult to ruin, unless one is speaking about massive oil spills, run-offs into rivers from mismanaged chemical plants or massive industrial accidents that release materials into natural waterways.
Every year such events happen throughout the US. Recovery is swift.
In addition, water purification and supply is a nationally distributed matter. There is no way to universally degrade it in the United States.
What, could hackers or cyber-soldiers blow up Pasadena Water & Power or make the complex unusable and all the water unpotable?
How do you do that locally in Los Angeles, one of the most populous places in the world? Water supplies in ponds are scattered everywhere, there is no one central water supply and plant to do something to.
Theoretically, if you believe someone can turn up the addition of chlorine, so what? You can’t supersaturate water with it. There is no way to turn water into bleach in everyone’s tap from the Internet. You can’t turn it into poison in any serious way. You can only try to turn it off.
Details matter, not potential bluff by one hacker, published in hundreds of stories — truth being determined by the number of people convinced to reprint exactly the same thing — that “[said] hacker posted pictures of [a water] facility’s internal controls.”
This matter, being more of a personal publicity stunt executed through PasteBin by a hacker personally indignant at the Department of Homeland Security at what he saw to be it’s dilatory attitude toward the dangers posed to the nation’s water system.
Indeed, using one minor news story, never really followed up to make a case that the entire nation’s water is threatened, is an obvious kind of propaganda.
Further, how could cyber-soldiers or hackers make doctors stop dealing with the sick in hospitals? They’ll turn off the power and corrupt all the patient data, never mind the senselessness of doing both.
Just go with me for a minute.
They’ll take away Internet connectivity and e-mail, and put ridiculous and dangerous results in digital logs of patient records, like prescribing insulin shots for everyone except the diabetics or Viagra for people with really bad tickers. Then the staff will roll out the needles, pills and drips and put everyone into a coma.
Ahem. Do you really think that the practice of medicine hasn’t had years of experience dealing with bad or screwed up e-mail, malware, and criminal pests who get into networks?
Anyway, it is exceptionally bad to try and stampede people into believing stupid things through the use of fear, no matter how well meaning you are.
In his essay the President is working from the script that the United States can be turned off with select manipulation of a few switches. This is an absurd construct, but an old one, and something that can also be dubbed a zombie lie.
Finally, readers can take note of the placement of this in the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper of the financial system.
Attack on the financial system has become a regular part of the mythology used to influence policy makers, even though it’s to laugh. Consider the state of the economy and the predicament of the 99 percent. The financial sector might be attacked! Really?!
What, exactly, would that do to the 99 percent? Not a trick question.
Cybersecurity is a serious national issue. But the implication that it is the issue or that your future is disappearing in front you due to the lack of it should put a bug up your a–…
[If] you conduct a meaningful public poll on how much average Americans really care about “the financial sector” being protected against cyberattacks, you might get an earful on how they’d like to be protected from the financial sector. Bank of America and Wall Street aren’t going to be popular again for a good long time. This is called ignoring the big picture, or historical context, and it has always had meaning for issues in national security. You cannot defend something or win the war when the little people, the locals, have little or no interest or incentive in rallying to your side.
Put another way, it’s impossible to ultimately secure an infrastructure of businesses the majority believes to be corrupt.
For the sake of a discussion that emphasizes the gravity of dealing with cybersecurity it’s just easier to quote someone higher up, like Leon Panetta: “Technologically, the capability to paralyze this country is there now.”
It works in a talks even though the people who’ve been around since the beginning quietly hoot and roll their eyes.
The argument that careless connection of remote systems to the Internet has been with us for a very long time. People have been saying this for years. Exercise caution when connecting stuff that you believe to be critical.
Some people do. Some don’t. Some do it and add security or presume they have. Others just put it on-line so they don’t have to be on-site all the time. This is the way of things and it probably always will be.
So, yes, there are going to be security problems but where are they in the entirety of the big nation and is there a master map?
These are unquantifiable questions no one can really answer except to say managing the security of such things and the risk imposed is a day to day battle.
The problem arises when it is all spun, as the President has done for effect, into a message of fear, delivered from the notion that it is trivial to collapse the nation from remote access, all for the motivation toward a policy.
There are arguments and debates to be made on this to persuade people, but sincere efforts take time and aren’t served by stuff like this. Yet it has always proven convenient to go with the pungent essay seasoned with fearful examples.
A recent update to Symantec’s antivirus software rendered some Windows-based PCs inoperable, the security software maker disclosed Friday.
An update earlier this week to Symantec Endpoint Protection 12.1 antivirus software for businesses caused some Windows XP-based computers to crash repeatedly with a “blue screen of death,” the company revealed on its Web site …
The company said it learned of the issue Wednesday night from customers, who said they were forced to manually remove the software from disabled machines, a process they described as time consuming … “This whole episode is a joke, had the issue been a conflict with a random device driver then I could maybe slightly more sympathetic,” the customer said. “But for it to conflict with its own Symantec related drivers and cause this issue is a total farce …”
Anti-virus software can’t be dispensed with by most. On the other hand, I was able to rid myself of it a few years ago through the combination of running things in a sandbox and knowing how to manually pick unrecognized malware off a machine.
I realized the only malware that was getting into my stuff was undetected by signature scanning and, subsequently, always removed before a signature update and automated purge was available. Indeed, the signature update would occur because I eventually submitted a sample and was curious about response times which were generally very good.
However, there was little practical value in continuing the use of it.
But I don’t recommend this for most. Regulars of DD blog, exempted, of course.
“In my opinion, it’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” said general Keith Alexander, he of the National Security Agency, on cyberattacks launched at our great country. Not quite, and no one has to rely on opinion. The greatest transfer of wealth in history is the economic collapse of 2008, a disaster that shaved 40 percent off the worth of most Americans and which still has the nation in a deep slump.
“That’s our future disappearing in front of us,” Alexander added on the consequences of cyberattack.
It’s a claim that’s been made more than once, mostly because it gets your attention.
However, Monday was the latest example, in a talk on cybersecurity and American power given at the American Enterprise Institute.
Cybersecurity is a serious national issue. But the implication that it is the issue or that your future is disappearing in front you due to the lack of it should put a bug up your ass.
The preeminent national security challenge faced by this country is devolution into the equivalent of a banana republic with the largest military in world history and all the implications of that for stability and, ahem, the preservation of economic well-being. The future disappeared for millions, right in front of their eyes, between 2007 and 2008. What’s left is still dribbling away.
Moving on, in the introductory part of the talk Alexander reflected on the advances made in computing power, musing about what it would mean for gene sequencing — “think what we can do for gene research” (leave the predictions on molecular biology to the experts, is all I’ll say), invoking the number of apps for Crapple devices — 500,000, and that in a couple years there will be more mobile computers in circulation than people.
Which tells you that the world’s haves are accumulating multiple gadgets at a furious rate, not that conditions are wonderfully transformative.
The statistics are necessary to give an audience reference points to hang onto.
Americans love statistics and if furnished with enough they will often not notice when one is straying into quantifying the unquantifiable. Which is where you are when hearing about the greatest transfer of wealth, ever.
But all of this was just a preamble to the center of Alexander’s talk on cybersecurity, the meat of which started with the problem posed by companies that did not know they had been hacked. They outnumber those that do, 100 to 1, he said. This is very bad and requires an evolution to information sharing at “network speed.”
This, according to the discussion, hinges on applying a “thin layer” of security on top of the “cloud,” with the patches, updates and anti-malware signatures pumped out automatically. In addition, information sharing equals the rapid dispensation of data on threats occurring in real time.
Alexander assured the crowd this was all to be done with care for civil liberties. It’s not the e-mail they’re interested in so much as what’s coming with it, and the signatures of attackers.
Information sharing between government and industry has been an issue for almost twenty years. No one who has argued for more of it has ever believed there is enough. It’s always been that way, along with the promises that no one will be reading the mail. That’s the standard line. Nothing new here.
Paradoxically, the people making the arguments for more information sharing now know that the conditions they want are virtually impossible. It’s always unfinished business with many private sector institutions not interested in that level of two way flow on computer attacks. However they cannot bring themselves to say it. Thinking in the United States has always been crippled by a beamish adherence to a “can do” ethic. A realistic admission that some things just can’t be done is heresy.
One suspects the battle is also lost to get the “American people” to trust anyone from the government on the issue. This is not any fault of Keith Alexander but a national condition that can’t be remedied by good words, or even law.
Many already believe their mail is being read, anyway. It’s a perception that’s fatalistic and entrenched. Does it matter? The way things have gone, it would seem not. Public debate has made very little difference on what the national security side of the US government wants to do, or does, in the last decade. No heads have rolled because the security men have gone too far.
In Tim Weiner’s “Enemies,” a history of the FBI, the author asserts the FBI was reading national e-mail for most of the war on terror, anyway, part of this under the name of what has been called Stellar Wind. But then it stopped.
By the record of who the FBI was arresting in this country and the charges brought, particularly through the middle years of the last decade, there appears to be a great deal of truth to such assertions.
However, the new requests for information sharing are for different reasons than digging up terrorists in the country’s backyard. Now it’s for the timely and rapid application of technical solutions.
Alexander also spoke to the audience about not wanting to wait for something bad to happen and then jumping to “where we don’t want to be” in the world of monitoring and collection.
Well, that would seem to have already happened and cyberattack was not the precipitating cause — it was that Osama bin Laden fellow.
Alexander told his audience he would be where he didn’t want to be the day after “there went the electrical grid, there went the financial sector.” Testifying before Congress about how it all could have been avoided, as with 9/11.
That’s what everyone says and Alexander is sincere. He does sound like he means it. But you’re always gonna have those kinds of days, one or two of them, in a lifetime. That’s the vagary of history and no one can get around it.
On the other hand, if you conduct a meaningful public poll on how much average Americans really care about “the financial sector” being protected against cyberattacks, you might get an earful on how they’d like to be protected from the financial sector. Bank of America and Wall Street aren’t going to be popular again for a good long time. This is called ignoring the big picture, or historical context, and it has always had meaning for issues in national security. You cannot defend something or win the war when the little people, the locals, have little or no interest or incentive in rallying to your side.
Alexander took questions for about fifteen minutes. To his credit he dismissed one reporter’s query on whether or not al Qaeda had a serious cyberattack capability. No, he answered but if someone with the right training were able to take advantage of knowledge and tools available on the Internet …
I’d have answered, “Look, buddy, al Qaeda’s virtually operationally dead. They have a hard time making underwear bombs, finding people to run them and even getting out .pdf files of their company organ. What makes you think they’re great cyber-warriors?”
It’s sort of like asking if one thinks the Cleveland Browns might win the Super Bowl in 2013. Y’know, the name was good once. A real long time ago. And, theoretically, they could get better.
But government men have to be cautious about what they’ll admit.
For the sake of a discussion that emphasizes the gravity of dealing with cybersecurity it’s just easier to quote someone higher up, like Leon Panetta: “Technologically, the capability to paralyze this country is there now.”
It works in a talks even though the people who’ve been around since the beginning quietly hoot and roll their eyes.
Mikko Hypponen of F-Secure does a takedown of the Flame virus here.
It’s not really a takedown although the introduction is, as a teaser. The post is a good brief summary and discussion list of escalating technical points — follow the links — leading to the conclusion that, hmm, Flame was really not so lame, the opposite of the post title. (This is called burying the lede.)
When the Flame malware was found two weeks ago, it was characterized as ‘Highly advanced’, ‘Supermalware’ and ‘The biggest malware in history’.
These comments were immediately met with ridicule from experts who were quick to point out that there was nothing particularly new or interesting in Flame.
In fact, the only unique thing in Flame seemed to be its large size. Even that was not too exciting …
Recommended. You have to read all of it. Helps if you have some familiarity with the subject, too. (Of course, this is likely all wasted on a standard audience which, largely, has very little idea about what’s under the hood in malware.)
Discussions on the technical merits of viruses, or the lack of them, have been around as long as the anti-virus industry. Beauty varies depending on the vantage point and the eye of the beholder.
New viruses have always been described as super when first discovered, particularly if they become a handle to great publicity.
As the news piles higher, so does their alleged superior technical quality.
Indeed, this is what the news media loves to hear. It makes the story all the more urgent and exciting. The hearts of editors and journalists swell for they are the ones getting the message out on the newest thing to turn the world upside down.
The Cryptic Morgue underground bulletin board system had a copy of the Mutation Engine which Newsweek reporters had mentioned in hysterical tones on March 6, the day of the Michelangelo virus’s activation in 1992, That virus had turned out to be something of a bust but, “beware the next round of computer viruses!” wrote the reporters,
I thought this was rather amusing. High school kids running a bulletin board system from their bedroom in Texas had access to “the scariest new virus … the Mutation Engine,” but Newsweek’s information gatherers didn’t. They’d just heard about it.
And the Mutation Engine wasn’t a virus. The Mutation Engine, or MtE for short, was a segment of code which provided any computer virus that used it with variable encryption, but only theoretically.
In practice the MtE was too difficult to use although the idea for its type of viral masking proliferated around the world.
The leading anti-virus vendor McAfee Associates showed the Mutation Engine to Steve Gibson — an excitable writer for the computer magazine Infoworld. He panicked publicly in a May column: “It is clear that the game is forever changed,” he wrote. The sophistication of the Mutation Engine is amazing and staggering.”
Gibson’s words made great quotes, perfect for anti-virus software releases. Central Point Software used the specter of the Mutation Engine in its direct advertising. Indeed, so did McAfee. Why should they not?
Vince McKiernan, a McAfee Associates vice president claimed, “We expect that the Mutation Engine will increase [the virus] problem exponentially for those with unprotected systems.”
Of course, if you a copy of SCAN by McAfee it was a different matter.
“Actually, we cracked this some engine some months ago and have been shipping product capable of detecting the Mutation Engine since March.”
As trade for access to virus bulletin board systems I wrote two variant viruses using the Mutation Engine. One was called CryptLab — which eventually was mentioned very briefly in a book called Approaching Zero, and one called Insufficient Memory which was included in one of the early issues of the e-zine, Crypt Newsletter.
They were used as barter for access to virus libraries. As actual spreading examples, Mutation Engine viruses weren’t successful. Jacking the code into new viruses was just too clumsy a task.
Because anti-virus companies used it as publicity, the had effective cures for it relatively quickly. That made use of it in new viruses pointless.
However, the technology it exploited was not pointless. In varying ways, it became widespread in computer virus programming.
How would one rate that? Superior? Sophisticated? Ahead of its time? Or just another thing to be summarily dealt with. It all depended on your outlook.
Jeff Moss, a prominent hacking expert who sits on the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council, said that it was difficult to persuade talented people with technical skills to enter the field because it can be a thankless task.
“If you really look at security, it’s like trying to prove a negative. If you do security well, nobody comes and says ‘good job.’ You only get called when things go wrong” …
Moss, who goes by the hacker name Dark Tangent, said that he sees no end to the labor shortage …
U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman Corp on Monday launched the first undergraduate honors program in cybersecurity with the University of Maryland to help train more workers for the burgeoning field.
Sean Sullivan, from F-Secure, said: “[Flame is] interesting and complex, but not sleek and stealthy. It could be the work of a military contractor — Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and other contractors are developing programs like these for different intelligence services. To call it a cyberweapon says more about Kaspersky’s cold war mentality than anything else. It has to be taken with a grain of salt.???
Not enough science and math majors, it reads. Boo-fucking hoo.
There are plenty of educated scientists in the US, just not precisely the ones these types of stories always pine for. Plus, there’s the private sector unwillingness to train on its own dime.
And so you haven’t sent it around because of the name and no one wants to really know about the nastier issues in writing viruses, anyway, because it’s so boring. It’s against Iran, too, and they deserve it. Better than bombing them.
