The U.S. Department of Defense recently reported that the Chinese military "has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks"
Source: Computer World Magazine
Is the Internet going to be the battlefield for future wars? Will this be a good choice for developing countries which don't have fancy weapons? Actually, I think that today information warfare is just a complementary weapon beside traditional ones. But for sure it is an effective one. We all know the economic impact of virii outbreaks and DoS/DDoS attacks. And I am sure countries shall start training computer experts and building security teams in order to develop cyber weapons as well as security systems to protect their assets. What really scares me is that almost all the softwares and network equipments that we use are made in USA, Europe or even China. We can never be sure that they do not have back-doors. People who call themselves hackers here are nothing more than script-kiddies. We have to have more advanced education programs in our universities. The government has to sponsor some local projects in order to build our own security products. One other solution is to have open-source softwares. I know that open-source security products are not that good. But having Snort as a second layer of defense beside you McAfee or Juniper IPS is a good option. Students in Computer Science faculties shall study open source softwares and learns from them or may be build their own softwares and add-ons to them.
By the way, I don't want to be very pessimistic here. I am sure that having an American firewall is much better than not having a firewall at all.
Tags: Security, Information Warfare, Gr33n Data
great point ya Tarek ,we will be doomed especially the Israelis are more advanced than us in the IT so in any possible war between them and us ....
ReplyDeleteabout the firewall , well I believe in the case of Firewall, it is good to have a chinese firewall will be better ;)
The problem with the Chinese products especially in such field that they are really lagging. However, there is Fortinet which is half Chinese, and they have somehow good Firewalls/IPSs.
ReplyDelete"Actually, I think that today information warfare is just a complementary weapon beside traditional ones. But for sure it is an effective one."
ReplyDeleteJust thought that you are negating yourself here saying that you think information warfare is just a complementary weapon but also effective, as I wouldn't call it complementary if it wasn't actually effective.
You can not depend on the IT weapon alone like traditional weapons, this is why he called complementary, because at the moment you can not for example hack into the system of USA star wars project and shoot the world, because it is still not that automated. Maybe in the future this will happen and this exactly what he said.
ReplyDeleteThanks IRC-Pres.
ReplyDeleteSeems that common sense is not very common now a days :)