cyber-"terrorism"?

[iriXx]

On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 09:43, Pete Chown wrote:
> Peter Sommer wrote:
> 
> > a concerted attack on the world financial infrastructure would have 
> > a high probability of failure ...
> 
> I agree, and I'm pleased someone is calming down the irrational hysteria.

thanks - well, i dont know about calming it down, but my book (actually
its on DRM, TCPA and Palladium and such) is going to make a big deal out
of the way propogandist language is being manipulated to cause such
hysteria....


> To tie the two threads together, what would have happened if Nimda had 
> erased people's BIOS chips?  I have it on good authority that several 
> large companies were out of action for a few days while they got Nimda 
> flushed out of their internal networks.  If all the machines had 
> required physical repair, the delay would have been much longer, and 
> enormously expensive.  This would be especially so because everyone 
> would have been trying to get their machines fixed at the same time, 
> overwhelming the repair facilities.

yes - this is actually possible... and something that has been raised as
a matter of concern over the last few days. 

> (I'm in a bit of a dilemma whether to post this, for fear of creating a 
> self-fulfilling prophesy, or giving ideas to the kiddies who write 
> things like Nimda.  I've decided that the balance favours posting.  If 
> these things are kept secret the dangers cannot be addressed, and it 
> isn't such a profound idea that no one else will ever think of it.)

thanks for posting it - if you're concerned in future please feel free
to reply privately, or use my pgp key (available at
http://www.iriXx.org/pub_key.asc ). i agree that the balance does favour
posting - this is an appropriate forum for us to discuss awareness and
address how to prevent the dangers...

bw
miriam
-- 
iriXx
www.iriXx.org

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