McAfee: Countries gearing up for cyber war

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NEWS

Major countries and nation-states are engaged in a "Cyber Cold War", amassing "cyber weapons", conducting espionage and testing networks in preparation for using the internet to conduct war, according to a report to be released on Tuesday by McAfee.

In particular, countries gearing up for cyber offensives are the US, Israel, Russia, China and France, says the report, which was compiled by former White House Homeland Security adviser Paul Kurtz and based on interviews with more than 20 experts in international relations, national security and internet security.

"We don't believe we've seen cases of cyber warfare," said Dmitri Alperovitch, vice president of threat research at McAfee. "Nations have been reluctant to use those capabilities because of the likelihood that [a big cyberattack] could do harm to their own country. The world is so interconnected these days."

For the full story, see Report: Countries prepping for cyber war on CNET News.

Talkback

The long term strategy is for America to incite cyber war with the East. They want to use Cyber war and cyber terrorism to hold countries to economic ransom if countries do not comply with political and military objectives.

America will use the threat of shutting off critical infrastructure of countries if political leaders don't agree to deals that America want to make with others.

This (cyber war / cyber terrorism) is a far more clean cut and covert 'serious consequences' punishment than sending in the B-52's or sending in CIA human assets on the ground to carry out over throw ops against a government not complying with trade and industry deals between governments in the east and west.

This what you see on media outlets is a secret war build up that is due to be played out as soon as U.S intelligence are happy Obama has done enough to secure cyber.

U.S can't carry out the ops it wants to carry out in the cyber domain until its country has met a certain standard of cybersecurity which it is currently not met.

The U.S can only carry out pocket attacks right now on small countries such as Estonia, Georgia etc because U.S isn't fully secure yet to defend a counter attack that would be expected against a cyber offensive carried out by U.S.

The strategy is to make all attacks appear to be coming from Russia or other enemy state of the U.S., the U.S are ininfiltrating computers of those states, as well as covert ops by CIA to physically plant malcode within major defence companies and technology makers.

The U.S are too scared to carry out a major cyber offensive right now cause their cyber infrastructure security is poor, as soon as it isn't U.S plan cyber attacks on major countries.

Because of the poor U.S cyber defense capability right now, U.S only have limited cyber offensive capability, its all U.S have the gutts to do right now until their cybersecurity is shored up.

n3td3v 17 November, 2009 13:23
Reply

Not in any country's best interests to do this at the end of the day because how can such a thing happen without hurting business and trade within your own boundary's, as already stated everything is so integrated with one another and is becoming more so everyday that passes by.

All this will do is drive private technology companies to derive newer methods practices & technology to counter and nullify it, foresight has nether being a politicians strongest point the gains sought after would most likely bare no more fruit than without it.

There again this article could be nothing more than scare mongering.

CA 17 November, 2009 22:03
Reply

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