Cyber security – how safe is our global data?
The Internet is our global backbone. While it hasn’t always been that over the past few years though I don’t think that there is anything going on in our world that isn’t in some fashion or another connected to the Net. Going forward it is bound to only become even more tightly integrated with every part of our society.
That is what made Robert X. Cringely’s post today interesting to read. In Collateral Damage Robert suggests that rather than just worrying about our “Internet” security within our own borders we should be worrying about on a global scale. Taking into consideration things like the vast amount of things that are outsourced to third world countries that involve computer networks and sensitive data and questioning how venerable their networks are.
It isn’t just a matter of taking down a single companies computers or crashing their government and business websites. It is to the point that in the case of war or terrorism whole countries can be taken out of the Net loop. What happens to our data at that point or as Robert used as an example what happens is Pakistan takes down India’s internet to the point that the country is one huge dead zone?
Forget for the moment about data incursions within the DC beltway, what happens when Pakistan takes down the Internet in India? Here we have technologically sophisticated regional rivals who have gone to war periodically for six decades. There will be more wars between these two. And to think that Pakistan or India are incapable or unlikely to take such action against the Internet is simply naive. The next time these two nations fight YOU KNOW there will be a cyber component to that war.
And with what effect on the U.S.? It will go far beyond nuking customer support for nearly every bank and PC company, though that’s sure to happen. A strategic component of any such attack would be to hobble tech services in both economies by destroying source code repositories. And an interesting aspect of destroying such repositories — in Third World countries OR in the U.S. — is that the logical bet is to destroy them all without regard to what they contain, which for the most part negates any effort to obscure those contents.
Could this sort of thing really happen? Well considering what has happened in the Balkans and Russia in the not too distant past this is something that should be worrying folks I would think.
