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posted by takyon on Wednesday June 24 2015, @07:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the insecurity dept.

The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill's most powerful lawmakers weren't graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.

Your computers, they told the panel of senators [YouTube] in May 1998, are not safe — not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don't care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it.

"If you're looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be," said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down "by any of the seven individuals seated before you" with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes.

The senators — a bipartisan group including John Glenn, Joseph I. Lieberman and Fred D. Thompson — nodded gravely, making clear that they understood the gravity of the situation. "We're going to have to do something about it," Thompson said.

What happened instead was a tragedy of missed opportunity, and 17 years later the world is still paying the price in rampant insecurity.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:02PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:02PM (#200557)

    If you believe opportunities were missed, I'd like to introduce you to some friendly people at the NSA...

    Compound that with the fact most senators in 98 had no clue whatsoever about that internet thingy, except maybe to get an update on Clinton's bathroom fun, and they don't have a deep-rooted habit to listen to 27-yr-olds who don't have a 9-figure net worth telling them to force companies to spend money. I'd say we are pretty much in the situation you could have forecasted on that day.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:16PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:16PM (#200565)

    Compound that with the fact most senators in 98 had no clue whatsoever about that internet thingy[...]

    Sure they did! They were all completely down with the fact that it was a bunch of tubes, yadda, yadda, yah....

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @10:04PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 24 2015, @10:04PM (#200627)

      That was a VP, not a senator

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:54AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @05:54AM (#200808)

        A fucking suit is a fucking suit is a fucking suit.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 25 2015, @03:59PM (#201035)

        That was a VP, not a senator

        Ted Stevens was a senator from Alaska at the time, dipshit.

  • (Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:40PM

    by tangomargarine (667) on Wednesday June 24 2015, @08:40PM (#200577)

    And companies prioritize adding new features and sexy to get people to buy the products over security? Surely not!

    From reading/skimming the article it sounds like the classic idealistic hackers vs. businesspeople divide. I just don't find this nearly as shocking as the article itself tries to make it out to be.

    "Make it secure, programmer-boy!" isn't really an easy task. And even if you have a department set up to look into security problems submitted, the bureaucracy will inevitably bog down. That's just the way it works.

    Pointing fingers at "you didn't fix it! we told you!" doesn't help anything unless we do something about it NOW.

    --
    "Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"