Open Eyes 042 Cyber Warfare Has Begun

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

-Sun Tzu

 

 

The first salvos in a new type of warfare have just begun to fire.

 

Sound a bit melodramatic?

 

Think again…

 

What is DDoS?

Over the past few days, the Internet has not been behaving as the Internet should.

Sites going down, disappearing, slowing down to a crawl…

Those of us that are computer savvy have probably noticed these thigns happening and have immediately thought of DDoS attacks going on.

For those not savvy, here’s what that is…

 

Back in the day, hackers and trolls (though we didn’t call them that then) would use scripts to fire off DDoS attacks.  Those were, to follow a metaphor, simple pistols in the war on the internet.

What they have now, in the form of BotNets, and large scale ones at that, are digital nuclear weapons.

 

The internet has, for some time now, been getting more and more militarized.  Governments around the world have been seeking out the best in the hacker world…

 

not to jail them, but to HIRE them.

 

If you go to Norse Corp you can see, in real time, the attacks going on between countries.

 

Right now, there is a massive amount of DDoS attacks happening between China and the United States.

 

I also have seen a LARGE amount of DDoSing happening in Saint Louis, MO, right in the heart of the protests going on in the Ferguson and St Louis areas regarding Mike Brown and Eric Garner.

 

It is, however, also the location of the Air Force Network Integration Center.

 

According to the Wiki article on it…

 

The Air Force Network Integration Center (AFNIC), located at Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, is the United States Air Force’s only organization for Air Force Network integration, cyber simulation, and network standards, architecture and engineering services. Through these specialized technical services, AFNIC supports the nation’s warfighters with decisive cyber capabilities for mission success.

 

The center, a direct reporting unit to Air Force Space Command is the focal point for integrating mission systems, business systems, commercial information technology products and other networks into the Air Force Network (AFNet).

 

 

A Little Horror Story…

Let me tell you a little story here…
Imagine if you woke tomorrow with no electricity…

 

You see, EVERYHING today is internet reliant.  EVERYTHING is based on the computer systems that have been established globally.

 

People say that they WANT us to be a cashless society, and that we’re heading towards it, but, people, we are already there!

 

EVERYTHING is done via computer systems.  IT IS ALL CASHLESS.

 

We could become a society with no infrastructure

 

How long could a society without infrastructure last before giving into the demands of the power behind such an attack? My guess is not very long at all. Starting over is not an option simply due to the logistics. A nation locked down by cyberwar is a nation powerless to be and the resources to fend off such an attack, ironically, have almost the same exact effect as the attack itself. It would shut it all down – to keep it secure.

 

Remember not long ago the big news, before the grand jury decisions about Mike Brown and Eric Garner started diverting attention, all of the news about Obama’s Immigration Executive Order was in the news… just before all of that began, the big news was that the Russians and the Chinese could hack our power grids and shut everything down.

That news disappeared quickly in the news cycles.

And now, I think we are starting to see the actual battles beginning.

 

Oh they have had test runs before, a few times over the past few years.

 

But this is pretty damn large scale now.

 

And it’s constant.

 

China just overtook the US as the economic superpower of the world.

Bear in mind, our infrastructure, especially the power grid, is fragile.

So fragile, in fact, that if one well placed bomb were to go off, there would be no power grid.

If transformers start blowing because they were given the computer command to send more power through than necessary, they would need replaced.

Some of those large transformers take upwards of one full year to be built.  Each.

 

If 20, 30, 40 of those were to go?

 

Indeed.

 

I hear people all the time talking about blowing an EMP bomb somewhere and knocking things out.  They’re not needed, folks.

 

Just one well timed DDoS attack, when the defenses are weak, in the right place, and, boom.  We all go down.

 

If The Trucking Industry Were To Be Impacted…

Even if they were, let’s say, to mess with the traffic systems in America, even a little bit, we would still be easily messed up.

I have known a lot of truckers in my day (even wanted to be one, til I went blind).  Each one of them said that if something were to shut down the trucking industry for even a day, it would take weeks for things to get back on track properly.

Take it out for a few days?  People would be rioting in the streets.

Grocery stores, for instance, generally only have 3 days worth of stock at any given time.  That’s it.

Imagine a run on the stores during a time period that the trucks were shut down due to a cyber attack on the infrastructure just regarding them.

It’d be chaos, swiftly.

 

Don’t believe me?  Take a look at black Friday.  If people act like that just to save a couple of bucks, imagine how they would be if there was no food.

 

Don’t believe that any of this can happen?

 

Sweden Has Already Been Knocked Out…

 

It did, December 12th of this year, people.  An entire nation was shut down.

It happened to be Sweden, and it was at least an hour worth of a shut down, which has taken them days to recover from.

 

Speaking at an Ericsson event in Stockholm, TeliaSonera’s CEO Johan Dennelind said the DDoS attack left “Sweden not working”.

 

http://news.yahoo.com/ddos-unprecedented-scale-stops-sweden-144801727.html

 

The crazy thing with the Sweden attack is that it was all in relation to a video game website.  The site, Electronic Arts was hit by the attack, and it became so large and so much of a problem that the entire countries internet was shut down, as well as their cable TV and VOIP phone line connections.

 

Think it can’t happen here?  Think again.

 

Sweden’s infrastructure in this regard is actually on the newer side compared to America.

 

And, one last thing to bear in mind with all of this, as well…

 

Corporations Are Just As Powerful As Nations

 

Corporations have as much power, if not more, than nations in the Cyber attack game.

 

It has been recently leaked that movie studios are effectively using these methods to try to shut down the net to prevent internet piracy.