When Scott Charney came to Berlin earlier this month for a conference on Internet security, he discussed an idea — "Internet hygiene" — that's now enjoying some fashionable attention. Internet hygiene is nothing more than good, clean computing practice to keep your machine virus-free. But Charney, Microsoft's vice president of trustworthy computing, took it a step further. He suggested that infected computers ought to be quarantined. "If a device is known to be a danger to the Internet," he said, "the user should be notified and the device should be cleaned before it is allowed ... Read More
Building Backdoors Into Computer Chips
October 6, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The Stuxnet worm, a now-famous digital weapon probably aimed at an Iranian nuclear reactor or enrichment plant, turns out to be a ham-handed tool for cyberwarfare. Although it was written to do significant damage to a single facility, with a sophistication that left some analysts breathless, it was anything but precise; it spread promiscuously by USB stick, using flaws in Windows, and wound up on machines from Europe to Indonesia. Swifter methods of electronic warfare may already exist. The secret Israeli attack on a suspected nuclear plant in Syria near the end of 2007 occurred during a ... Read More
War With Iran? Stuxnet May Be First Cybersalvo
September 28, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The last time a Middle Eastern government hostile to Israel came close to building a nuclear bomb, the Israelis reacted with a swift, clandestine air raid that destroyed the reactor in question (Saddam Hussein's Osirak plant) before it could enrich uranium. Advance rumors of a similar raid by Israeli or American planes on Iran's nuclear facilities have been circulating, of course, for years. But some computer experts wonder if a new form of warfare — namely the computer worm called Stuxnet — hasn't been launched against Iran already, either by Israel or the United States. Guessing ... Read More
USB Warfare: The Real Electronic Nightmare
September 22, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The gist of this column lately has been that threats of "cyberwarfare" waged through the public Internet are the stuff of Hollywood schlock and patriotic pulp fiction. But there are other ways to wage electronic war, and they tend to be more terrifying precisely because they're tougher to fight. Siemens announced in July that a malicious bit of code called Stuxnet could spread on USB thumb drives and try to lift industrial secrets from its clients around the world. It's the first large-scale worm of its kind, an act of sophisticated industrial espionage that indicates the real future of ... Read More
International Treaties and the Internet
September 15, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
A United Nations background paper on fighting online criminals calls cyberspace "the fifth common space — after land, sea, air, and outer space." It's a stirring achievement of the human imagination, not only to build an entire "space" where people can live and socialize, manage their finances and play "World of Warcraft," but also to run into so much trouble that the space requires international regulation. In my lead column on cyberwarfare, I came out against international treaties modeled on, say, chemical-weapons accords that would pretend to establish cyberpeace among highly wired ... Read More