Twitter: THE NEXT STRATEGIC WEAPON!

[Admiral2]

If this has already been discussed here, I'm sorry, but I found this utterly fascinating.

A blurb on the cover of the September 14 issue of Aviation Week and Space Technology caught my attention. It read: "THE FIRST CYBERWAR/Russia-Georgia analysis." So I turned to the article expecting to read about military guys on both sides in bunkers launching computer attacks, and that may have happened, but as I was reading, I was floored by this paragraph:

For example, altered Microsoft software was fashioned into cyber-weaponry and hackers collaborated on U.S.-based social-networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to coordinate attacks on network based targets in Georgia.

Emphasis added because...Twitter and Facebook???

The main source of info for the story was a report from a group called U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit. Apparently, the Russians used these sites to recruit and mobilize civilians from Russia, Ukraine and Latvia. They got people to join up, gave them the necessary tools and let them attack vulnerable computerized civilian targets in conjunction with the military action...and it worked!

Successful attacks nearly all produced direct benefits for the Russian military. For example, a web site for renting electrical generators was jammed, "presumably...to reinforce the effects of physical strikes on the Georgian power grid" the report says.

Some of the cyber-attacks appeared to have a strategic focus on Georgian oil and gas pipelines that compete with those of Russia, the report states. Occupation of ports and railroad lines coupled with with cyber-attacks "soon made all of the Georgian pipelines unreliable", it says.

Well!

I'm quoting from the print article, but I also found an earlier, shorter report on Aviation Week's website. Here's the link:

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=defense&id=news/CYBER082109.xml

Does this bother anybody? I mean, a world power just Tweeted one of its neighbors into submission. How does that happen? And can it happen to the rest of us? And would you answer the call if your government tried to "friend" you into taking down its enemies' cybersystems?

 

[Alpha_Geek]

Ah, the koobface virus.

 

[Admiral2]

Ah, the koobface virus.

So what am I missing? What is this "koobface virus"?

Actually its not even the technical "which virus when" that has me stumped. It's that the Russians found a bunch of Russian Tweeters and Facebookers and said, "Hey! how'd you like to help us take down Georgia?" and a bunch of them said "Sure, why not?", and then went and did it! I find that frightening and intriguing at the same time.

 

[CuttingEdge100]

I don't trust twitter. They have very little security (And I'm not a person who asks for excessive security...), and personally I believe the U.S. among other governments use it to aggregate information on people. And what a better way? People on Twitter pretty much say everything they're thinking...

I don't have an account with them and I don't trust them.

 

[Data Holmes]

Go watch the movie Sneakers.

Cosmo - The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeroes, little bits of data. It's all just electrons.

 

[Spaceman Spiff]

"@georgia pew pew pew surrender"

 

[Admiral2]

Go watch the movie Sneakers.

I've seen the movie Sneakers. It's a very good movie about a few American computer experts who find out about a way to take advantage of a single flaw the US of the movie stupidly built into all of its communications systems.

We're not talking about this here. We're talking about individuals across the borders of three nations that were given several keys to attack disparate systems within a fourth nation. And in Sneakers the experts weren't necessarily patriotic in thought, even though they eventually were in deed. I can't imagine them wanting to help take down another country on the behest of the US. But here, Russia asked, and mostly Russian citizens said, "'Kay. Sure."

Like I said, I'm not really asking whether or not the technology exists to do this. Of course it does. I'm also not concerned with how it works. What I want to discuss is who should really be using it for the purposes of warfare. Should it just be limited to military personnel, whose job it is to attack other countries, or is it really okay to turn to civilians to assist in the dirty work?

And if it is okay, would you, as user of one of these systems, answer the call if it were your own country asking?