The Human Animal (Humans)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, September 01, 2009, 22:36 (5353 days ago) @ David Turell

Again, having spent time at a school with a powerful computer security school, you should be MUCH more worried about worms such as Conficker as they can deliver a worse payload than an EMP bomb without needing to spend millions on a weapons program--AND you do NOT know when the payload hits. This past year virtually all SCADA networks (Command and control systems for US power plants) were cleaned of malware of Chinese origin. You don't need rockets or bombs to cripple U.S. infrastructure, you just need smart kids with internet access. Countries do NOT need EMP to do what you're worried about. That's why China and Russia are so heavily invested in computer science programs.
> 
> Very interesting point of view. I thought we could protect computers with firewalls, etc; but one primative small atom bomb exploded at 200 miles over the center of the country will wipe out the electronic controls and communication covering the entire country.-No. Firewalls are far from secure. Built into your ethernet card is something called a MAC address. The table that stores that unique value is updated once and once only--when the computer boots it. Getting your MAC address only requires a day of patience, a deep packet sniffer such as Wireshark to sniff your MAC address from a network packet. Spoofing a legit MAC address on a network can also be done by freely downloadable tools such as Cain and Abel or BT3, sometimes by 1 or 2 clicks. The only safe computer is one that is not connected to the internet at all, preferably with the switch firmly in the "off" position. -A bomb such as what you're talking about would require my buddies over here at Stratcom to be snoozing at the switch. We can track a hand-size object in space. Are you familiar with what happened during Russia's invasion of Georgia last year? They were knocked off the internet. Conficker presently controls a botnet of 5M computers--more computing power than any supercomputer in existence, and its being actively manipulated by absolute professionals. You could take the entire US off the internet with that--the backbones are all private and exercise varying levels of security. It'll also take ten years to get all SCADAs on the internet off the internet. And as I said before, it's much cheaper to knock out targets with software than with a bomb. You're worrying about the wrong thing at the moment.

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\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"