[ISN] Are we talking "cyber war" like the Bush admin talked WMDs?

http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2011/04/are-we-talking-cyber-war-like-the-bush-admin-talked-wmds.ars

By Matthew Lasar
Ars Technica
April 27, 2011

Turn any corner in the complex metropolis that is Internet policy and 
you'll hear about the "cybersecurity" crisis in two nanoseconds. As a 
consequence, the public is treated to a regular diet of draconian fare 
coming from Sixty Minutes and Fresh Air about the "growing cyberwar 
threat."

Former National Security Adviser Richard A. Clarke suggests a thought 
exercise in his hit book Cyber War: imagine you are the assistant to the 
president for Homeland Security. The National Security Agency has just 
sent a critical alert to your BlackBerry: "Large scale movement of 
several different zero day malware programs moving on Internet in US, 
affecting critical infrastructure."

As you get to your HQ, one of the DoD's main networks has already 
crashed; computer system failures have caused huge refinery fires around 
the country; the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control 
center in Virginia is collapsing, and that's just the beginning.

"The Chairman of the Fed just called," the Secretary of the Treasury 
tells you. "Their data centers and their backups have had some sort of 
major disaster. They have lost all their data." Power blackouts are 
sweeping the country. Thousands of people have already died. "There is 
more going on," Clarke narrates, "but the people who should be reporting 
to you can't get through."

This sort of scare-the-children prose has become something close to the 
norm, complain George Mason University Mercatus Center researchers Jerry 
Brito and Tate Wakins in a new working paper about what they see as the 
real problem -- "threat inflation."

[...]


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