The experts are to be believed, Russia seems to be the home base for the hackers. Presumably, Putin has no interest in stopping them and maybe is supporting/directing them. Wouldn’t a tit-for-tat response be appropriate? If it happened, would we even hear about it? Is Russia’s internet somehow more secure than the U.S?
What I read a couple of days ago is that it’s not against the law in Russia to commit cyber crimes outside of Russia. Since its not illegal they don’t enforce other countries laws this has led to a lot of hacker types moving and setting up shop in Russia with caviots on their websites that their tools are not for use against Russian systems. One example was some kind of worm that was for sale that the first thing it did was direct the primary language of the computer it was infecting and if it was Slavic the worm deleted itself.
As for the US doing something about it years ago I read that US foreign policy with regards to cyber attacks was “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and the US has the glassiest house”. Basically there were more potential attack vectors into the US then we could ever defend so attacking at all was a bad idea. I’m not certain if this is still true but it sure seems to be.
I was unaware that cyber crimes committed outside of Russia weren’t against the law in Russia. Still, it would seem that someone, somewhere would do the same thing to Russian companies/oligarchs that is being done to U.S companies. And shame on those U.S. companies who have poor security on their systems. Pay now or pay later, I guess.
You must be unfamiliar with the US system. If that is the choice pay later is always selected, that’s someone else problem.
I’ve read that the US has more computers and is more dependent on computers than just about any country. That makes it more vulnerable. Also, the lack of national standards for cybersecurity mean that some systems are secure while others are wide open.
Sadly, it is simply our vulnerability to counter-attack that keeps us from acting. It is not that we are more vulnerable than the rest of the world, everybody is vulnerable, but we have the greatest amount of valuable cyber dependent resources.
Apparently nobody in this thread has heard of Stuxnet.
The US has been involved in cyberwarfare for some time. The trouble is that – for various reasons – we’re better at offense than defense.
I saw a documentary about cyber warfare that said if war ever broke out with Iran that the US already has things set up to pretty much cripple the entire nation by cyber hacking.
However they also said after doing that, getting things restarted will not be easy.
doesn’t the US sometimes knock out other nations internet as retaliation? didn’t the US do that to North Korea after they hacked Sony?
I did not know that.