CYBERSECURITY
The greatest catastrophe we can face is war, because it can last for so long. Most every other type of catastrophe is at least over quickly so we can begin to pick up the pieces, except pandemics and global warming. Simply put, war is policy by exhaustion. One side has to exhaust their resources, or willpower, for it to end. That can take years. Now war is being even more prolonged as its character is changing right before our eyes.
It used to be that a war was started by tanks rolling across the border, or Pearl Harbor, or 9-11. That was and is an old-fashioned war. But war is becoming more subtle, to the point we don’t even know when it starts. A biological war could be started by “accidently” releasing a deadly virus from a “research” laboratory. Or war could be begun by a series of mysterious “accidental” fires at food processing plants. Heck, we might be at war right now, and we would be too stupid to even realize it. Right wing conspiracy theorists are saying just that about all the food processing plants being destroyed. Of course, it could just be that all these food-processing plant fires are random coincidences, or just routine business practices to collect fire insurance. But it could also be an organized attack on America. For both sides see “Fact Check: Recent Fires At US Food Processing Plants do NOT Show Plot To Cause Food Shortage,” by Sarah Thompson, April 26, 2022, www.leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2022/04/Fact Check. She fairly cites an article and then attempts to debunk it. Read her column and reach your own conclusion. Then do a search and find how many “attacks” on food processing plants have happened since her article.
A third way the next war will start is by cyber-attacks. We all know about hackers, state-sponsored hackers, and our FBI anti-cyberterrorism announcements. But to be sure, we will be attacked before we know it, and in a war “they” will unleash more and better (worse?) methods and software than we have seen to date. So far, “they” have just been probing our defenses. So far.
I can only think of a couple defenses. One is to convert government internal operating systems to a closed architecture, where no access is even possible from outside the government buildings. They would not even allow usb drives, which can carry viruses. None of them connectable to the internet. Let government employees who need to, have two computers with one accessing the government network and another accessing the internet. The second defense is to convert everything to VPN. There is a third security approach, used by our military. I have read that our nuclear launch codes are kept on floppy disks, read only by floppy disk drives, using outdated and obsolete technology. Yes, but no one can access it. When was the last time you saw a floppy disk drive?
This will be a really good blog for nerds and geeks to contribute their insights.
One other observation is that we live while history milestones are being made. Catastrophic thinking means recognizing these changes in what is around us. The introduction of television was just in the 1950s; the internet was just in the 1980s; crypto-currency just in the last 10 to 15 years. War too is changing right before our eyes. Like David and Goliath memorializing the introduction of the sling, the Battle of Crecy with the long bow ending the era of the knights, World War Two supplanting the battleship with the aircraft carrier, we are now witnessing the replacement of expensive capital war vehicles like tanks, helicopters, and ships with the new era of cheap missiles and drones. We are now entering a new arms race of the development of jammers, interceptors, and decoys.
Not to mention, we are seeing conventional warfare replaced by logistical warfare. We now see how a big powerful nation can be humbled by a little nation which is smart enough to attack the big nation’s logistics and supply chains, by blowing up ammunition depots. I can only hope America’s military is paying attention as our military relied on ammunition dumps in World War II. We cannot do that any more.