Nukes Don’t Scare Me. Computers Scare Me.
I wonder if Tim Berners Lee thought to himself as he was creating the first intranet, ‘What if this gets into the wrong hands someday?’.
I wonder if any of us could have predicted something more devastating and debilitating than nuclear war. I wonder if World War III could be waged from a couch in a living room, with nothing more than a computer and a few key codes. With every single advanced system living and interlinked on the internet someplace or another, it’s not a surprise that this creates a dangerous proposition for national security.
Some classmates produced a parody of what could potentially be a very real scenario in the future. With power grids all connected in our country, one intelligent individual could turn out the lights in just a few minutes, from a remote location. Common sense would tell you that you could detect such an attempt and track the ISP of the computer back to the location the attack was being orchestrated from.
But someone with enough smarts to overheat a reactor from a computer would know how to block their identity from being determined. This 60 minutes clip provides more detail about cyber espionage and presents a scenario that is a likely possibility in our future.
The possibilities are endless. Everything from traffic lights to airline communications and nuclear reactors to electricity for warmth could be shut down via computer.
Is ‘cybergeddon” inevitable? I’d say no, although a proper solution evades me right now. Without knowledge of United States government protocol, it is hard to assume what preemptive measures are being taken on our part to ensure this type of catastrophe never comes to fruition.
My ignorant instinctive response is to devise a secondary internet that is accessible only by select and strategic entities. This includes our global allies, the UN, and the US government. This system would act not only as backup storage for our current internet, but also is equipped with an overriding mechanism in the event that someone does shut down and cut off circulation to our nations power grid.
But that system’s access would be solely dependent on trust of those with access. And like those with access to the existing internet, there is ALWAYS a way to corrupt something intended to be beneficial. I don’t know if there is a way to ever have a safe internet. But I tell myself that the government has addressed the worst case scenarios so that I can sleep at night.
It’s bad enough that Google owns my online identity. Now I need to worry about starving to death because someone across the globe cut off the power to all of the water plants in the US. Who needs chemical weapons when you have passwords and a MacBook?
The age of the smart cyberterrorist is upon us.
