Cyberwar

Last month I watched an entertaining BBC documentary about Computer Security, Defeating the Hackers. It deals with several common topics like the threat to security posed by Quantum Computers, and the solution provided by Quantum Cryptography. It also mentions a new concept to me, Ultra Paranoid Computing (well, it seems quite new to everyone, as there's no wikipedia entry), bringing up the idea of using passwords that we are not aware of and as such we can not reveal. This other post explains it a bit more, but above all, the most interesting part to me of the documentary is the section dealing with the Stuxnet worm. Well, indeed, being a computing and history/social issues freak as I am, it felt like quite embarrassing to me being absolutely unaware of such a "bomb". So far I think it's the most important CyberAttack ever done, and it gives me the creeps to think how these things can evolve in the future (ok, admittedly this time the output of the attack seems pretty good, Iran's nuclear program being damaged and delayed, but bearing in mind that the perpetrators were 2 ultra-nationalist governments: USA and Israel, I'm quite sure they could launch the attack against any other less "evil" target at any moment, just to ensure their "supremacy" and their role of "policemen of the planet". This paragraph in wikipedia is quite unsettling

Sandro Gaycken from the Free University Berlin argued that the attack on Iran was a ruse to distract from Stuxnet's real purpose. According to him, its broad dissemination in more than 100,000 industrial plants worldwide suggests a field test of a cyber weapon in different security cultures, testing their preparedness, resilience, and reactions, all highly valuable information for a cyberwar unit.

Last week I stumbled upon another related documentary (indeed, even more interesting), produced by Spanish public TV (unfortunately it's only in Spanish). En Portada has been producing some excellent documentaries for many years (for example the one from a few months ago about the fascist Greek party (paramilitary unit) "Golden Dawn" was outstanding), which is something really praiseworthy in a place where 99% of the TV production is stinky crap that is direct responsible for the illiteracy, passivity and amorality (or just plain degeneration) of a whole society. This program deals again with the Stuxnet case, and also mentions some other examples of cyberwar, like the attacks on Estonia (this was well known to me), and 2 cases where cyberwar was combined with "traditional" war: an Israeli attack on Syria in 2007 and a Russian attack on Georgia in 2008.
There's also some interesting info about the Bahnhof service provider. This program is previous to all the NSA surveillance scandal, so they do not mention how in the last months many organizations are starting to look at European companies to store their data to the detriment of USA ones, now seen with huge suspicion. I hope this trend continues on and it means some boom for European Data Centers and IT professionals.

Related to Security, some weeks ago Martin Fowler came up with a brilliant concept, Data Austerity , pretty interesting food for brain in these times of "Big Data coolness" everywhere.