Today I want to take a moment to think about the physical aspect of cyber warfare. First, some context.
I was listening to Steven Crowder, who made the interesting point that if China attacks and takes over Taiwan, then the semiconductor industry would be mostly in their hands. With the international supply chains being as they are, we already have a hard time getting hardware. Add to that a tussle between countries involved in the supply chain and almost nobody is happy.
So let's assume that the supply of fresh hardware (laptops and the like) dries up for the west. Older hardware becomes more important, and being able to repair hardware will make you an asset of great value.
In recent years we have had examples of cyber-physical boundary-breaking attacks. One of these was BLACKENERGY, where a support center for a Ukranian energy company was DDOSed while their converter boxes were taken offline, leaving many people without electricity. Another was STUXNET that targeted industrial systems in Iran.
Imagine, however, targeting people's work devices (laptops, phones) and especially government employees and use driver bugs to fry their graphic cards and the like. With the supply of hardware being run dry, you could starve a country of their computing power and their ability to have internal structure and take them over by once again having superior computing power.
You would not have to physically take the country over, you would simply quickly set up your digital system while the actual government is scrambling to keep things running.
I am not an army guy, and probably this would be more involved, but it seems to me we are reaching a strange point in time where supply chains and computing power can be more important than physical might.
In the IT we already feel the strain because while we are growing, we are harder and harder pressed to find phones and modern laptops for our employees. That experience, together with the guest lecture I gave once, for which I looked deeper into cyber-physical warfare, made me think of this.
Tech nerds better hunker down and have a few backup plans ready!
But let me know in the comments, what do you think about cyberspace being this vulnerable? Or do you think it is not? Is the cloud where we migrate to, such that the Dutch Government would migrate to thin-client access into a secure Microsoft cloud? Would Microsoft be able to resist the urge to coerce cloud-based governments to make nice laws for Microsoft business?
Would it be possible to migrate to the cloud even, would old hardware be able to function enough to provide us at least with that backup plan? Are there other scenarios or options?
There is so much more to this one chapter, but it is so good already!
I had to cut it short because guests arrived, but this should get you started on your own study :)
@calvinrempel Thank you once again for the Theology Tuesday you did, I refer back to it in this one :)
@JamesDerian Congratulations with your Marriage :)
Next time there might (almost certainly) not be a Theology Tuesday, so the official next one will be February 22nd! I have a marriage to attend. As the groom. Our home is still half a project.
Fun times!
Alc and I talk about my book that is now officially finished. This is part 1 of 2. Parts have not been neatly cut. Part two will air 5 minutes after part 1 for coninuity!
Hope you enjoy :)
This is the third corner to have persistent discussions and talks in. I love tech, but especially once it transcends hardware a little. I have two degrees; a bachelor's in Software Engineering and a master's in Information Security Technology. My graduation thesis focused on assembly-level optimizations (that is, one level above the hardware level) and my free subjects were in formal verification. This is why I love programming in the security corner, or maybe it is the other way around.
I started going down the Security path because I early on saw that the world around us would become a dangerous cesspool of badly-implemented and hostile tech. Now I am one of the people that understands the field around that mess :)
So in here you can discuss secure phones, weird programming languages, sad truths about internet-connected fridges. Also about malware, adblockers, and so on and so fort!
A lot of tech talk I do over at the @Lunduke community, where a lot of nerds hang out and it is ...
Much like the reading corner, let's have a music corner! A few rules for this one, since some music can be provocative. I don't mind much but let's keep youtube links with risque thumbnails out of here.
Other music I might also mind. "Do you find that offensive?" might someone ask. Yes, there is some music I choose not to listen on principle, and I walk a thin line there sometimes. But do not worry, I have a wide taste otherwise so feel free to share almost anything :)
Either way, here is the music corner!
Many times when we talk about security, we mean to say "Digital security". In essence we mean to say that our hardware and software that we use stays safe no matter what we do. And even though the ISO27001 standard (and by extension, for example, the NEN7510 standard) make it abundantly clear that security is a people-domain problem, we usually take that as a process-like truth. Meaning, we think that being secure is a matter of regulating people.
The truth is very different. For example, while writing this I am pretty shot. I slept five hours and I an under influence of a bunch of painkillers and some alcohol. Before you ask what I was thinking, let me mention that I have a genetic defect in my spine that I am dealing with right now by taking measured doses of all three (and yes, to get the Bible into this conversation, there is even a biblical ground for the inebriation with alcohol - see proverbs and the letters to Timothy - , although I did not use red wine. But hey, I am still on top of ...
