There are White Hats and Black Hats starring in a whole new caper called Vulnerability Information Services where vendors pay good guy hackers (the White Hats) to find back doors into their systems and software before the bad guys (Black Hats) do. White and Gray Exploit Sales markets are where hackers trade in the assessment and management of IT assets. Black Exploit Sales markets deal in keeping that information private and then building Weaponized exploits on top of such highly keen insights. Keeping White Hats from becoming Black Hats is like keeping Jedi’s from going to the Dark side. Hacker One tries to do just that by hosting competition’s where Internet companies pay hackers “bug bounties” in an effort to get them to register their discoveries. The very cool documentary ‘Zero Days’ discusses it all.
The British GCHQ was caught red handed launching a malware attack against Belgium Telco Belgacom. Belgacom has a huge telecommunications network in places like Africa, Asia, Europe and the Middle East and made for an ideal party line to tap in order to listen in on suspected terrorists. For an insanely thorough and interesting account of that spy game, check out The Intercept. Now they’re calling on ISPs to rewrite standards to prevent large scale attacks. Rather ominous…
Stuxnet – the first true Cyber Weapon ever deployed, kept the Iranians scratching their heads and wondering why their uranium enrichment centrifuges kept going up in smoke. Using PLC’s (Programmable Logic Controllers) to red line small motors that powered enrichment centrifuges, Stuxnet may have destroyed up 1000 of them.
Just a few weeks ago a Distributed Disruption of Service attack (what amounts to a busy signal when a browser is trying to connect to a web server) caused a minor amount of headache and confusion on the US coasts.
Physical and Virtual reality is being stitched together faster and more tightly with each passing day. It is often referred to as the Internet Of Things, but the amount of things connected will be dwarfed by the sum of its parts; for what it will become is something we cannot even begin to imagine. But I’ll try. As 10 Billion devices that are currently connected to the internet balloons to 34 Billion in 3 years, and then God knows how many exponentially more beyond that… human minds incrementally approach a sort of imagination continuum. Willpower becomes not so much an effort in faith, but powered effortlessly by faithful technology. I envision 2 worlds – One that we can see, touch and feel, and another which is invisible. We will all exist in the physical world, but some (more likely groups) will possess the power to control it from a world you and I cannot see as if they were Sorcerers. Think ‘The Matrix’, but instead of a species of intelligent computers, it’s other humans pulling the strings of the real world from behind a curtain. The physical world will come under our control. The real fear of course, is of the damage to infrastructure and disruption of society that evil will inflict. Unfortunately, when it does, it’ll have us wondering how technology got as far out of our control as the weather and leave us just as susceptible to its most potent outbursts; Digital Earthquakes, Techno-Tsunamis, Meta- Meteor Showers and Hyper-Core Hurricanes.
Techno-paranoia is well documented in both text books and pop culture. But I think for the first time, those concerns are not so far off…. and that the Shits’ about to go down!
LUCKILY – Some US companies, like ones that begin with the letters M, A, G, and F, have mastered the internet like Eddie Van Halen has mastered the electric guitar. In the coming days, we will come to have faith in these companies like Catholics have faith in the Holy Spirit. Their dominance in our society will one day likely be what saves it. They’re expertise (which nobody probably even knows the half of) is going to bail us out of a world of hurt. We also may never even know they stepped in to help. According to the DHS Cybersecurity website, “DHS coordinates with sector specific agencies, other federal agencies, and private sector partners to share information on and analysis of cyber threats and vulnerabilities and to understand more fully the interdependency of infrastructure systems nationwide.”
Translation: the only way we can even hope to control the wild fire that is the internet is through our Monopoly pals.
…… I ain’t got no problem wit that!
