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A major cyber attack will happen between now and 2025 and it will be large enough to cause “significant loss of life or property losses/damage/theft at the levels of tens of billions of dollars,” according to more than 60 percent of technology experts interviewed by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
But other experts interviewed for the project “Digital Life in 2015,” ( http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/29/cyber-attacks-likely-to-increase/ ) released Wednesday, said the current preoccupation with cyber conflict is product of software merchants looking to hype public anxiety against an eternally unconquerable threat.
It’s the old phantom of the “cyber Pearl Harbor,” a concept commonly credited to former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta but that is actually as old as the world wide web. It dates back to security expert Winn Schwartau’s testimony to Congress in 1991 ( http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=pst.000018472172;view=1up;seq=14 ), when he warned of an “electronic Pearl Harbor” and said it was “waiting to occur.” More than two decades later, we’re still waiting. The Pew report offers, if nothing else, an opportunity to look at how the cyber landscape has changed and how it will continue to evolve between now and 2025.
http://www.defenseone.com/threats/2014/10/cyber-attack-will-cause-significant-loss-life-2025-experts-predict/97688/
(Score: 2) by gidds on Friday October 31 2014, @03:17PM
For those of you who weren't about (alive, or working in IT) last century:... Lots of people used to save space in files and databases and microprocessors by storing only two digits of the year (e.g. '85' instead of '1985'). After all, we'd got so used to writing and thinking of years that way, it seemed only natural.
Then, in the late 1990s, it suddenly dawned on some people that that wasn't a sustainable practice. By then, a lot of devices had electronics in them with some sort of date or time processing. So at midnight on 2000-01-01, lifts might have frozen or plummeted; aircraft might have fallen out of the sky or been given stupid directions by air-traffic control; bank accounts might have suddenly gained or lost vast sums; pacemakers and telephones and power stations and traffic lights and all sorts of other electronic devices might have stopped working, with potentially lethal consequences. (Of course, most systems would probably have worked fine; but some wouldn't, and so they all needed checking.)
The dilemma facing those who understood the risk was that if they didn't make enough noise about it, then organisations and people wouldn't have made all the necessary checks and fixes, and there could have been all those dire consequences, combined with lots of nasty questions like "Why didn't you warn us???" But if they did make lots of noise about it, then nearly everything would get fixed/handled, and there would be lots of nasty questions like "Why did you make all this fuss for nothing???"
In the event, they erred on the side of making some noise; and although there were many minor failures, I don't recall hearing of anything major.
(Of course, those of us who looked more than 6 months in advance had been using 4-digit years all along, and so didn't get to put in lots of hours at exhorbitant rates fixing things...)
And ever since, the 'Year 2000 Problem' has had a bad rap as a storm in a teacup, a lot of fuss about nothing, a pointless scare...
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This sounds like the same sort of dilemma. If we don't raise awareness of the importance of security, the risk of Bad Men trying to do Bad Things to our electronic devices, and the need to protect against it in everything from military supercomputers to internet-connected light-bulbs, then those risks will be very real. But if we do scare people enough to improve security, then (hopefully) we will have nothing to be scared of!
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