by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe Admiral James Stavridis says that governments the world over are battling cybersecurity issues.
“Governments are struggling with cybersecurity individually,” he said. “Within their borders, within their cyberspace, they’re attempting to find the balance between availability of information and control of information.”
And it is the control of information they are often more concerned with than in fact proper cybersecurity. The struggle against attacks in cyberspace we do not appear to be winning.
Stavridis also said nations around the world “face a constant struggle to understand the interchanging world of cybersecurity,” because of the Internet’s massive size and number of users from across the globe.
This may be so but what the Admiral purposely forgets to tell the people of the world is that the USA would love to see itself as the cyberspace policeman, in the same way as they believe to be the world police when it comes to real space, and would dearly love to be able to turn off this website or that simply because it does not fit into its modus operandi. Wikileaks would be one of them and its founder it would like to jail or, better still, if some rumors about secret orders are to be believed, to have terminated with extreme prejudice.
Concerns over web-based assaults have reached a fever pitch recently as the Stuxnet worm that targeted Iran’s critical infrastructure demonstrated the destructive power of such attacks.
Head of U.S. Cyber Command Gen. Keith B. Alexander testified before Congress last month about the need to create a secure zone for federal government and key private-sector and industry networks.
After we have finished laughing about that idea let's look at it with a real eye. Our infrastructure has become way too reliant on computers and computer controls and the smart grid will really be something that the hackers and the serious cyberwarfare guys will have fun with.
We have over-automated every aspect of our lives, our cars, our energy production and distribution, and even our food distribution, and the slightest problem can have major effects.
Power stations and the electricity grid can be knocked out with the flick of a switch, almost, and the g-ds only know what other havoc problems in cyberspace could and can cause.
While I love my computers – yes, I have more than one – I would not want to reply on computers in any shape or form for the running of vital infrastructure. Humans can err, we all know that and human error has caused problems before many times but...
Let's bring things back down to scale, a human scale, and that also means that the power plants must be brought back closer to where the consumers are until such a time that every house is a power station in its own right.
On other levels too we must get the automation out of our lives and bring humans back into it. They are not susceptible to computer viruses, trojans, worms and such like.
© 2010
