Cyber-attack Threat: is It Real?

Cyber-attack Threat: Is It Real?

Ask the IT folks in Iran and China about Stuxnet.

I imagine they are some pretty angry folks right about now.

I wonder what the payback is going to look like.

Gavilan

I hope people use discretion with their comments so as not to give terrorists any ideas of weaknesses that could be exploited.

It's real - and it's not new.

We've already had several 'cyber-incidents' , two of the most damaging back in 2001 were Code Red and Nimda.

While the actual damage they inflicted was limited to defacing websites and mass mailing, the collateral damage in time spent repairing infected systems was huge. Hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide were taken down in little over 20 minutes. Now imagine if they had been designed to do real damage like flashing the system BIOS, trashing drive MBR's or overclocking/overvolting the CPU. These sorts of problems cannot be fixed by simply restoring from backup and disconnecting from the internet until a patch becomes available. We were lucky back then, maybe not so much in the future if the black hats have enough economic/political incentive.

So yes, the threat is real and is not a question of 'if' but 'when'.