Cyberwars: Is the pen still mightier than the sword?
L33tdawg: Kenneth is delivering the keynote at the upcoming 9th annual HITB security conference, HITBSecConf2011 - Malaysia, on 12th October at 0900. Online registration closes on the 7th but walk-in registrations are still accepted there after.
We are living in a new era of human conflict. All modern critical infrastructures, including electricity plants, are vulnerable to cyberattack because they are IT-dependent and, however tenuously, are somehow connected to the Internet. Therefore, all sites of strategic national significance must beware, even in times of peace, because sophisticated cyberattacks do not occur overnight - they require long-term subversion to be successful.
Today, all political and military conflicts have a cyber dimension. Worldwide connectivity and the amplification power of networks give politicians, propagandists, hackers, criminals, soldiers, spies, and revolutionaries good and bad ideas, as well as the opportunity to effect them in the real world.
The Hong Kong Blondes, Cult of the Dead Cow, Gary McKinnon and Anonymous do battle with hacker tools, practical encryption, support for human rights and evidence of government conspiracies. In 2010, there were two milestone events in the history of computer security. Wikileaks released thousands of classified US war documents, proving how susceptible any modern organisation is to cyber theft and espionage.
