Bad Beowulfs &c (OFF-TOPIC)

[j at cnb.uam.es]

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"Jesse Eversole" <jee at marketdriven.com> wrote:
> 
> Not in my general experience with institutions you would expect to be
> secure, like financial institutions.  You hear about "I Love You" because it
> is a widely witnessed event.  Unless public relations makes a big mistake,
> you will not hear about a large loss of money.
> 
To repeat myself in a different way: the task to do is mainly a brain force
task. To do it by human powers is terribly difficult. Much more so if it is
to be compreensive and requires coordination of different knowledges gotten
from different sources by different people.

Doing it by machine power is even more so, since you need an amazing AI
running on a supercomputer (beowulf or not) that's capable of understanding
systems, protocols and their bugs with little or no information at all in
most cases. Programming such an AI is an even more difficult problem than
before.

Getting this done means finding bugs affecting all kind of systems and
developing a synergistic, bug-free attack in a matter of hours, which is
even more difficult if not impossible. The bad guys may *not* do any
field testing for that would reveal them prior to the general attack.
The attack has to work instantaneously and synchronously or it will be trivial
to prevent it from spreading trhough far, slow or redundant lines. And  it
must seize control of equipment so it is not shut down/turne off and may
spread over temporary down/overloaded lines and temporarily disconnected
segments.

Now, tell me that after "I LOVE YOU" all those companies that were unprotected
and got attacked losing zillions of dollars won't update in several years
afterwards their antivirus software for that same antivirus so this kind of
delayed, coordinated attack works years later as suggested.

It's _not_ a matter of politics or computer power. It's a matter of human
intelligence.

					j


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