CIA Claims Cyber Attackers Blacked Out Cities 280
Dotnaught writes to tell us InformationWeek is reporting that the CIA admitted today that recent power outages in multiple cities outside the United States are the result of cyberattacks. "We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands. We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge. We have information that cyberattacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States. In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet."
Why are systems like this hooked onto the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
i smell... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why not use air-gap firewalls? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where does this idea that every computer that exists must be plugged into the net come from?
Re:CIA and Cyber Hackers? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why are systems like this hooked onto the inter (Score:1, Insightful)
1. There may be situations where the systems need to be remotely administered, and using the Internet is a much, much cheaper way to facilitate this than deploying a completely private network infrastructure just for this purpose, which probably isn't very practical (for both physical and financial reasons).
2. pr0n browsing.
This is really serious! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why are systems like this hooked onto the inter (Score:4, Insightful)
It takes only a single breach. The story mentioned it may be an inside job, which means somebody may have put a single little link between the two systems, breaking the separation.
Re:15% solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:15% solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just in time... (Score:1, Insightful)
FUD.
This is the biggest pile of BS ever (Score:2, Insightful)
Dear CIA, If you're so concerned, go unplug the router, and don't waste your breath and insult the intelligence of 14 year olds with your 'teh Chinas hackin teh Gibson!' line of crap.
Los Angeles (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:BS (Score:1, Insightful)
Don't let this provoke a Pavlovian response (Score:2, Insightful)
The predictable response class, however else you may think of it, actually categorizes as "believing the information out of hand".
The other response is watched more closely for various reasons: to see who's missing screws or needs to be portrayed as such; to see who has anti-U.S. agendas or needs to be accused of such; conversely, to see whether any Americans are intelligent enough to "get it" (the intelligence game or information commodities manipulation), or, to see whether they've made any internal errors of estimation or accuracy.
That's just how the statements are analysed. As for motivation, sometimes these statements are provided to sort of "poke" the public and instigate certain beliefs to become more widely held (or more widely dismissed), and sometimes these statements are released as a form of "noise", or what some people mistakenly refer to as "smokescreening". In an actual smokescreen, some information is used to either obliterate the immediate availability of some other information or draw attention away from it. In the use of "noise", some information is important enough to covert yet valuable enough to keep on the information market, so instead of the information being occluded, it's obscured instead by means of flooding the market with information that's similarly themed (or even just similarly spelled).
So if you, say, go on about the public statement as if it's truthful, or possessed of a genuine concern for the American public's mental and emotional well-being, then you are definitely missing half the truth but might be missing all of it (depending on the motivation).
Re:15% solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why not use air-gap firewalls? (Score:2, Insightful)