samuri.co.uk

For those of you not in the know, the awfully geeky title refers to a reconnaisance attack on the nato website. nmap is a tool used by security people to determine what vulnerabilities might exist on a networked device.

Now, read this.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article7144856.ece

Ok, so if it’s passed you by, what the proposal states is that people who carry out cyber attacks on NATO countries, could find themsleves to military action. Obviously we can substitute ‘China’ for people and ‘America’ for NATO countries.

So this is pretty much telling us that America intend to carry out military action against China in the very near future, all they’re doing now is getting the legislation in place prior to engaging.

I could of course be insanely paranoid about America’s stance here and I know better than most that the role that China are taking in today’s cyber crime is a severe and definate risk to a number of Western countries but I’d be loathe to suggest  actually bombing shit out of them to make them stop as an actual solution.  I presume they’ll target computer installations/data centres/ISP’s and transmission paths.

There is of course an alternative. The internet has grown into a very powerful tool, in doing so it has become a very open and entirely untrusted network through which these attacks can take place. It’s used by a great many corporations as a cheap network layer to stop them having to buy dedicated links and it’s this reliance on a public and unpoliced  network that has placed so many public, private and military organisations in danger.

It’s about time that these organisations accept that the internet is not a safe place, stop spending a fortune trying to stay one step ahead of bad guys and isolate their real inportant information from the day to day stuff. Yes, it’s going to cost more money, yes it’s going to be a right ball ache and yes it’s going to have a lot of sticking points but I’m confident it constitutes a better foreign policy than shooting anyone who tries to break in. Maybe if the Americans didn’t live in a culture where 28,000 people are killed a year by guns they might consider the alternatives with a more open mind.