Karen Salmansohn wrote a piece for the Huffington post on “cyber” war (still hate that word) from within.
From Huffington Post:
By all mainstream press accounts, the U.S. remains focused on guarding against inbound attacks by large and small enemies, a classic defensive posture anticipating warfare coming from the outside-in: a War of Mass Destruction.
But what if it’s an inside-out job — a cyber-attack via the internet: a War of Mass Disruption?
Think about it: We’ve become a nation of “internet addicts.” Even the smallest of businesses is obsessively dependent on constantly accessing, transferring, and acting upon information via the Internet.
I confess to personally often feeling like a new millennium O.C.D. character in an Oliver Sachs book: “The girl who couldn’t stop watching my email” — with minor symptoms of “google junkie.”
And the more all of us Americans increase our dependence on the Internet, the more we make the Internet a prime target for “Hacktivists” — enemy cyber terrorists.
And, it really wouldn’t be that difficult to do. I would be more concerned with bored teens at this point than with a concerted attack. Think about it. The “bad guys” take out the internet? Not entirely likely as they need it for the same reasons that China wouldn’t hit Atlanta in a nuclear strike. They would want to watch their progress on CNN.
Read on.
[tags]Cyber War, Insider Threat[/tags]