Circuit Writer Version 6.8 by Jim Scheef Cyber War Publishing deadlines often create strange interactions. A few months back a new (to me, at least) magazine began to appear in my mailbox. SC Magazine is oriented to computer security professionals but has articles of (relatively speaking) general interest as well as reviews of enterprise-level security products. One of their regular features is a summary of current threats and cyber criminal activity around the world. Today I noticed an item in the March issue saying that computers in Russia are believed to be the source of DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks against what amounts to the entire country of Kyrgyzstan. Now why is this interesting? Because at about the same time that SC Magazine was writing that item, the New York Times was writing about how the Kyrgyzstan government would not renew the lease on “our” Air Force base located near their capital. Ordinarily no one would care, but this happens to be the main air base used to supply the war in Afghanistan. So, conspiracy theorists, rather than summarize the geopolitical implications, I jump right to the question: were these DDoS attacks set up by the Russian government to pressure Kyrgyzstan? For some input, please read Rob Enderle’s blog on Dark Reading (tinyurl.com/c3kupg). Did a vindictive Vladimir Putin order the DDoS attacks? It’s hard for me to imagine a gang of bot pharmers attacking a central Asian country. What would they gain? To keep you thinking on this, here’s a report from 2007 about China “probing” the Department of Defense. If cyber warfare is a real possibility, are we prepared? Where is the cloud today? Now that we’re all confident about the security of the Internet as part of our national infrastructure, let’s go back to the cloud for a final episode. In his article “In The Clouds -- Part 3”, John Patrick applies his Internet criteria to the cloud, as it is available to real people today. After all, how large corporations use the cloud is nice, but in the final analysis it’s how you and I can use it that really matters. I will not try to summarize John’s article, but my hang-up on adopting the cloud has always been the difficulty of integrating the pieces. This is becoming easier as many cloud services like Zoho Apps and Google Docs, offer space for storing files. After all, what good are your files on iDrive if you must download them to a strange computer before you can edit the document you need? So iDrive is for backups and other places are for work in progress. I urge you to read John’s article. In fairness, he wrote it last December (just after his DACS presentation) so some things have changed. Google Docs is now better than what he describes and on the other hand, some cloud companies have succumbed to the economy. There will be no dotcom boom to fuel cloud computing for the masses. If this is the future of computing, it must provide us value that we can afford with security and privacy. I agree with John that it is worth a look, if only for the convenience of access to your computing environment from anywhere. ).
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