re: #191 realwest

I found it unusual that the DOS attacks on Government offices over the last 4-6 days included an attack on the United States Secret Service - couldn’t imagine it having anything to do with Russia while Obama was there.
Then I realized that the USSS is also responsible for trying to stop and/or arrest those involved in counterfeiting. And I wondered about the Russians both because they do have pretty good technical competence and because the Russian “mafia” has been notorious in it’s attempts to counterfeit US currency.
What do you think about that?

Definitely possible. China scares me more, personally… and the Iranian government getting a crash course in disrupting the internet isn’t making me say yay… Where Russia goes from here is an open question. I don’t think the Russian mob has any interest in seriously disabling us. They want to steal our money, which means we have to keep making it. China is not. our. friend. Russia suffering enough in this economic collapse for the oligarchs to slide off in to the shadows and let the Soviets come back is a scary thought.

My personal most frightening domesday scenario is a coordinated attack by a hostile nation on the backbone.

We’ve had some sort of malicious damage to fiberoptic cables in California (news.cnet.com) in April. I’m a bit skeptical that the Med cable cuttings were all from drag anchors. (Once or twice, okay, dragging anchor where you shouldn’t be… the number of times, though… makes you go hmmm.) (cryptogon.com)

A sustained, coordinated attack is a big unknown. No one really knows how resiliant the internet is, how much the failover capcity will work and if the net can self-heal well enough to stay up at all, even if slowly.

for good reason, we also don’t know if there is a secure net for government and if so, how developed it is. It’s common knowledge (for values of common that include spending a lot of time reading security bulletins and geek websites) that there is “black cable” out there (washingtonpost.com) - but no one knows where it goes or what it’s for (note: i’m not suggesting we should. i could live if my servers went down for three days. i’d rather the FBI’s not join them).

I don’t even want to think about the cost of lives and money if we lost the net for even a week. It would seriously harm electric, emergency communications, phone systems, security devices, life support and hospital structures… 30 minutes to go from today to Victorian times.

/this has been your moment of paranoia, brought to you by ~Fi