NASDA / Collapse / Intruder Virus in RL... ?

[Rman Virgil]

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RL imitating art..?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012 ... mments-bar

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[Lord Apocalypse]

Not yet. If you look back to early computer history there were far more dangerous virii floating around. Some from what I understand would render your computer nothing but useless slag with out chip replacements. And this was in the 80s! Viral technology during the dawn of computer made quantum leaps in ability until around 95 i think then they went stupid and haven't approached the same destructive level until now. Probably due to most of the original programmers being in jail or the fact that modern trojans/worms are designed more to make people money rather than to cause physical/digital destruction.

[Rman Virgil]

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After reading your post LA I did a little research on the current state of Cyberwarfare and found this 3 part series which presents what strikes me as a balance, thorough and concise presentation that arives at your conclusion.

http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/828-cy ... r-war.html

Very interesting. Would seem Scavenger low tech tacs would be more effective in taking down critical infrastructure for the foreseeable future.
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[aubergine]

I've not had chance to read that second article yet, however my own perspective is this: I think in the early days viruses were made for "willy waving" - showing off the coders talents for infiltrating a machine, spreading to other machines and then doing something visible (like wiping the BIOS on a pre-defined date) to let everyone know they had succeeded.

These days, hacking / viruses / etc., seem more business like - they are aimed at gaining access to resources (eg. for botnets), performing DDoS attacks (eg. for extortion) and stealing information (eg. credit card details or bank logins). Thus, there's no real incentive to simply destroy the infected machines any more, it's become more important to quickly gain access and steal information and then ideally leave without a trace.

That's just a personal view, I could be (and probably am) utterly wrong.

[Lord Apocalypse]

Also, an old school virus was written almost entirely in C++ and assembly. Most widespread viral infections now are done with scripting languages that are far easier to deal with than MOV eax,ebx JMP eax etc. I think the trend though is for a lot of the hard core viruses to move back to strictly ASM/C++ as the code is a lot cleaner and can affect far more systems than something done in VB Script (remember that popular virus from the late 90s?). Script Kiddies turned hacking and virus creation into a joke for about a decade as it was very easy to do both for awhile.

[aubergine]

A lot of the low-level hackers are now turning their attention to attacking the hardware directly. For example, bugs in Intel CPUs can be exploited, via a network card for example, to gain access to RAM regardless of operating system being used.

[Lord Apocalypse]

"A 14-year old hacker cannot do damage to a country. It takes extensive infrastructure to perform this,"

I don't think this is entirely true. If they can hack into a system and bypass a firewall it would be possible to plant a virus or even steal enough source code to engineer a virus specifically geared to some particular software and it wouldn't take years to do either.

[Rman Virgil]

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Post appocalyptic scenarios tend to focus on cyberwarfare, nukes and pandemics induced one way or another by the manufacture of virulent microbes.

All high tech scenarios.

It is my contention that the greatest appocalytic threat is decidedly low-tech: bringing down the centralized energy grids of nations.

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/43823

The US has 3: one for Texas, 2 for the rest of the country. I've lived through one being brought down by accident so I got a first hand glimpse of what that would be like.

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