Tuesday, December 13, 2005

On spies

I just started reading Ira Winkler's book "Spies Among Us" and its fun! A review will be coming soon.

And, reading the book finally cleared my head on the subject of ... oooh, so horrible ... "cyberterrorism." Intuitively, when you read about "cyberterrorism" you instantly think "what a load of bull", but the amount of press and "research" that you see coming about it, makes one wonder. Like, I was reading Dan Verton's "Black Ice" and it did sound believable, albeit sensationalist. As a result, I was somewhat confused about the subject.

Until now! Ira's book finally cleared it: at this stage, "cyberterrorism" is positively, absolutely, 100% "bull product." Here is why: computer failures are an accepted thing. "Everybody knows" that computers "are flaky", and might crash at any time, taking your work (or a billion-dollar Martian probe :-)) with them. Thus, computers do a pretty good job damaging themselves and things around them, and, thus, people will not be terrified if it happens due to malicious actions by whatever cyber-terrorists.

Now, the above obviously doesn't cancel the use of computers and the Internet by the terrorists. They gotta use it, just like everybody else...

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Dr Anton Chuvakin