New Senate Bill Proposes President Can Disconnect the Internet

This is nothing but great. They have a similar thing with the radio and television broadcasts in case the President needs to nationally broadcast a very important statement. If a cyberattack did ever occur on the scale where the President of the United States had to intervene, and certainly people will try, it would potentially save all of your businesses and you would do nothing but thank him.

The Internet and it's technologies are far beyond the point where people's ACTUAL lives are intertwined into it and some very bad people, over the course of the rest of humanity, are going to try everything into their power to override it. This is a simple precaution that had to be taken at some point and the people who have qualms towards the new Health Care or stimulus packages and automatically roll their eyes at each new law being passed these days need to understand that this will undoubtedly benefit tens of millions of people throughout America.

First comment: If you're going to react based on the misleading title of the story, don't waste your time. It's not an accurate representation of the situation at all.

Second, if you don't think some sort of centralized response mechanism is necessary for responding to cyber-attacks, you are less informed than you should be on the issue. The potential vecotrs for attack, and the known potential targets, make this a critical activity. The question isn't "should" they do it, but rather can they do it effectively.

Third, if you haven't taken strong steps to protect your system from falling under the control of an outside party, you'd be much better off spending your time working on that than theorizing that this is some evil scheme to expand government control.

The most powerful form of brute force attacks online at the moment is the existence of large and decentralized botnets. Private computers, like the one you're using to read this, which are infected with programs that let some remote party make your system do things without your knowledge.

The scope, size and capabilities of these bot networks is constantly growing. Many of them are already sufficient to take down very large sites and legitimate networks, without external help or cooperation between controllers. They're mostly used for spamming, phishing and DDoS attacks, but that could change in a day.

The threat these tools pose is extraordinary, and cannot continue to be ignored or treated as a casual inconvenience.

Similar problems exist for hosted servers and many other systems connected to the Net. And then there are the problems associated with individual or small-group intrusions, attacks by agents of foreign governments, and the ever-present threat of an "inside job." These are all greater threats to your privacy, security and personal finances than anything the government is likely to consider, even in the case of abuse of the system.

That said, we should pay attention to this and work to keep even the smallest abuses from occurring, where possible. One does not secure freedom by changing masters.

Remember, this isn't about reading your private emails (they can already do that if they want) or controlling your actions online. It's about actual threats to real systems on which people's lives and daily activities depend. Some examples to consider:

The networks which control ATM machines, credit card systems cash transfers and other financial transactions. Let someone get even minor control or blockage on these systems, and there'd be hell to pay. You'd be the one getting the bill for it.

The telephone network, especially emergency responder systems: Take down the phone system, or just the switches involving emergency responders, in an area and you've got people dying, unnecessary property loss and random failures in response to criminal activity.

If that's co-ordinated with a serious attack of some other kind, it could be disastrous, multiplying the damage of the offline event.

The stock exchanges: Consider the potential damage if an attacker could gain control of even a small portion of the systems that control stock trading or commodities exchanges.

Transportation control systems: Air traffic controls, switching systems for subways and trains, or even something as simple as the controls for traffic lights, where those are centralized. Use your imagination.

SMS (text messaging) servers/systems: How much damage could someone do by sending ominous threats to masses of people via text messages? Or spreading false stories through the same medium? Or simply flooding the system with garbage, or stopping it entirely?

SMS is not just used by teenagers. A lot of secruity systems use it for notifications, along with companies that rely on it for employee communications.

News sites: A very simple social hack. Plant false stories simultaneously on a few of the major news sites, and you could create a panic, with the results being affected largely by the focus of the story.

These are just a few potential problems, from among the hundreds (or thousands) that could be made to happen through attacks on the virtual infrastructure. There are many that are much worse than anything I've listed here.

Just think about the number of things that can be affected or controlled by network-connected interfaces. Then consider that there are people out there already planning or developing systems to attack most of them.

The problem is already huge. It could get much bigger very quickly with the right kind of attack. And we're not anything like ready for it.

You'd be surprised at the damage that can be done by just one (1) compromised machine on a broadband connection. There are millions of such compromised machines out there, right now.


Paul