What Your Mother Should Have Told You!

iStock_356796Medium.jpgby Bill Conkis – Sassy Computers, Inc.

The older I get the more I can appreciate how far advanced we are technologically. When I was about eight years old and living in Detroit, Michigan, my mother took us on an outing that I believe was presented by one of the big three auto companies. One of the many displays was about “The Future,” and two things stuck in my mind. The first was a telephone with a small TV screen on it: we were told that someday we would be able to see the person we were talking to. The other was a sign-up list (I think with Pan Am) for a commercial flight to the moon.

Given the current state of computers, and video cell phones, and the many ways in which microchips are now used, I think “The Future” must have arrived. (And that means my name must be pretty high on that list for the flight to the moon, since I signed up when I was eight!)

Thanks to technology, the average American is living better than any
king or queen in the past. Any soccer mom knows the Internet is where
to find information about any subject even if they don’t own a computer
themselves. What most moms don’t know is how dangerous the Internet
could be to our country and world events.

Technology has made the U.S. the most powerful nation in the
world, giving us a power that is incalculable and unstoppable. It is
our sustaining rise, but is it also our Kryptonite fall?

America is rapidly moving into some perilous times, and we all
are beginning to see how quickly and easily our comfortable lives can
change. Many families are losing everything they own — or thought they
owned — and huge corporate conglomerates are tumbling to the ground
like the Twin Towers. The news media are relentlessly grinding our
hopes to powder, leaving us with a feeling that some huge, quantum leap
is about to take place in our world. In some circles there are even
fearful rumors about “limited” nuclear war; thankfully, these devices
are costly, very difficult to make and arm, and highly monitored by the
powers that be.

Rather than a bomb, the unseen force that threatens the U.S. is
more likely to be an invisible attack like the Kryptonite radiation
that renders Superman helpless: an Internet cyber-attack. The FBI
considers cyber-attacks to be the third greatest threat to the security
of the United States, after nuclear war and weapons of mass
destruction.
Given how complicated and expensive nuclear bombs and WMDs are to
obtain, while a small group of cyber-terrorists can easily inflict a
great deal of damage to the United States from half way around the
world, the threat might better belong in the number one position.

An economic cyber-attack could deal a major economic blow to the
nation’s financial infrastructure, crippling our economy. In February
2000, a small “Denial of Service” attack, with an estimated cost of
$338,854, shut down Yahoo. A cyber-attack could also shut down
electrical grids, leaving us without electricity and causing widespread
blackouts similar to an EMF above-ground nuclear blast.

The United States has recently experienced a limited version of
an attack. According to an article in the “National Journal” reported
by Shane Harris May 31, 2008, “Chinese hackers pose a clear and present
danger to U.S. government and private-sector computer networks and may
be responsible for two major U.S. power blackouts.” These officials
believe that the intrusion may have precipitated the largest blackout
in North American history, which occurred in August of that year. A
9,300-square-mile area, touching Michigan, Ohio, New York, and parts of
Canada, lost power; an estimated 50 million people were affected.

In a worst-case scenario, multiple systems or networks would be
attacked simultaneously, especially military computers. The attacks
would gather sensitive information such as troop and convoy movement,
secret projects, and the like. Limited attacks have already taken place
on our military computers in Afghanistan. A cyber-attack there last
year was, we believed at first, by China; now it is thought it came
from Russia. In a full-scale cyber-war, successful simultaneous attacks
would collapse our economy, shut down electrical grids, and disable our
military communication as well as the civilian communications,
hospitals, and other critical infrastructures. If these synchronized
attacks were successful, the cyber-attack would then be followed by
military strikes.

Few people know that just last year the World Bank was badly
exploited and compromised in what is among the broadest and most
persistent attacks known. In a story reported by Richard Bahar of Fox
News, “The World Bank Group’s computer network – one of the largest
repositories of sensitive data about the economies of every nation –
has been raided repeatedly by outsiders for more than a year.”

These attacks are not by teenage nerds using sophisticated
hacking programs. Our fears concern hackers working for — or with the
blessing of — foreign governments and military forces, especially
Chinese and Russian. Is Vladimir Putin’s “new weapon” a cyber-bomb? Was
it not Nikita Khrushchev who said before the UN, “America will fall
without a shot being fired?”

The compromise of the World Bank’s security has dire
consequences for the United States. Dr. Joel Brenner, an executive from
National Counterintelligence, has said, “If instead of attacking the
Twin Towers al-Qaeda had taken down a major bank, the economic
consequences would have been an order of magnitude ten times greater
than the economic consequences of 9/11… Taking down a piece of our
banking system would be enormous, and it would reverberate through the
world financial system.”

Is this what really happened? What if the current economic
collapse was caused by the cyber-attack on the World Bank and other
institutions that might have been compromised. Could the entire
mortgage crisis and stock market downturns be the domino affect of
these exploits?