CyberHoaxes 1

Richard Clarke has a new book out, which means that “Cyberwar” hype–also known as full employment for computer security consultants–is making the rounds of the talk shows.

The list of luser$ hacker countries of which we should be very, very afraid commonly includes North Korea, China, Iran, and whatever other nation is the bad guy of the moment.

People buy into the hype because, for most of us, a computer is a magic box we don’t understand–so it’s easy to believe it can be used to saw the beautiful assistant in half and then reassemble her.

It’s akin to your older relatives who, in the early days of electricity, feared that current could somehow leak from an outlet that had no plug in it. As George Smith points out,

Why, all those wily North Koreans have to do is rent a hotel room in China and launch a cyberattack on the US on the 4th of July against government websites hardly anyone visits!

This is not to say that computer security is unimportant. It is. There are safety rules for computers just as there are for electricity.

As George Smith also wonders, does the recent boo-boo by McAfee warrant adding them to the list of rogue states?

There is a good primer on computer security hysteria at Vmyths. (Sadly, Rob Rosenberger doesn’t seem to have updated the site is some time, but what’s there is still good info. I don’t know whether the George Smith I quoted above and the George Smith who is listed as a co-editor of Vmyths are the same person, but I suspect they are, or they is, or he are, or whatever. The computer security world is a small one.)