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Guerra En La Red: Los Nuevos Campos De Batalla (2010)

by Richard A. Clarke(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 2

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Editorial Planeta

review 1: I don't think you should read this without reading the scathing review from Wired magazine. The review calls Clarke alarmist and points out a number of technology issues with his argument. There obviously is a balance between the book and the Wired review. I don't believe we should be complacent and ignore the points Clarke raises. I did find the book repetitive and in need of stronger editing. Yet, I feel it is such an important topic for all of us to understand that it is worthy of a high rating on that basis alone.
review 2: This book is pretty interesting, some examples on cyberwarfare cases were presented, what china and russia are capable of doing.Keyloggers can read and save everything I type, put into a file and send it to hackers juts like I did for t... morehis review.Electric grid, pipelines, airports all use software. The book mentions 'logic bombs' - special code that gives deadly instructions to trains to go full stop, airplanes control surfaces to dive, electric power grid to release huge jolt of electricity into its network and then to wipe out, erase itself completely!The gist of the book is that as we rely more and more on computers, software, and technologies - the more vulnerable we become to get hit from cyberspace by highly trained hacker teams from china and russia.In 80s, soviet union wanted to steal pipeline controlling systems - a compplicated software to pump oil out of cold siberian spaces. CIA surreptisioucly gave them slighly modified software through canadian firm. The russians took the bait, installed the system and it worked nicely in the beginning, but then the logic bomb was set off and the system gave instructions to pump at highest speed on one end of the pipe, and close it on the other end! the result was the bigges non-nuclear explosion in russia!The internet was designed without much focus on security first, because all users were handful trusted university members. It had 5 main flaws: unsecured protocols etc. Developers who write code make mistakes and when codebase for big projects grows very large, even best trained experts can not see suspicious lines of code.Information systems develop much faster than security measures to protect them. Security systems will be falling behind.The so-called "chipping" means putting special logic bombs or caps on weapon system shipped to a potentially hostile country. When the war situation arises, the warhead does not explode, the radar does not detect anything in the sky; or the system issues\sends fake commands to attack its own units.The problem of attribution - who started the attack - a hacker or a whole nation can be solved with similar measures to nuclear agreement: a special team of experts checks software & hardware regularly and install some software to detect malware in early stages. A special monitoring center can be created in every member country - if there is ddos attack coming, the monitors will display it with unusual peaks in traffic flow.Nations can also sign a contract that forces each gov-t to actively track down hackers sitting in its country. Failure to comply will make the rest of countries 'black-hole' all traffic coming from the host country.Clarke shows very deep analysis of the problem from various perspectives: cyber warfare can be as damaging to civil infrastructure (airlines, railroads, distribution systems) as nuclear weapon, but works much faster and hard to detect. Thus, cyberwar prevention strategy has some similar points to nuclear prevention schemes developed in 60s. Since cyber weapons can be highly disruptive, a new convention of what is the use of cyber weapon, distinction between hacking to collect data and placing worms must be developed. Cyberwar poses new challenges to all participants due to its nature: tracing back the attacker, identifying hacker, no common platform or document to ask governments to cut off the hacker from network; very important is the fact that US is more vulnerable to cyber attacks - us gov-t can not protect most important civil systems & banking, but only protects military. US is very tied, wired into the internet, even places like powerplants, grids are connected and can be hacked right from caffe, starbucks.Around 20 nations have developed cyber offensive units.In the exercise called "South china sea crisis", china decides to land on disputed islands having oilfields and shortly gives command to the chinese navy. Vietnam claims the islands belong to his waters and may ask(ironically this time) US for help.US cyber command may decide to slow down troops loading onboard and goes first - launches cyber attack on chinese military network(i.e. sends offending email inside the network) What if chinese leadership decides it is a full-scale attack on china? Not just preventing hasty move? They may launch opposite attack on us civilian systems( in us, they are privately run) through previously installed trapdoors. Or launch logic bombs on financial systems, banking - and worms eat all data. This will bring chaos on forex. Crushing global finances can backfire however, since many are tied through others.--------------------------------------------This is interesting analysis of what cyberweapons can do in our highly wired world. less

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