The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
In the past, geeks didnÕt fight wars. In the past, geeks hid from drafts or became non-combatants so that they could help out their nations in any way they could. In the best case scenarios, geeks might have become code-breakers or worked with intelligence in some way. No more. Geeks now get to move to centre stage. Over the last several weeks, a short, intense conflict has been taking place between Russia and Georgia over the breakaway territories of Ossetia. Georgia says they are part of their territory, Russia says they are only supporting people who want an independent voice in forming their own nation. Whoever is telling some part of the truth is often hard to find; and now itÕs getting even harder with cyberwarfare. Cyberwarfare is a nationÕs ability to interfere with the computer networks of another nation. Not minor geek stuff or the inconvenience of not being able to check your e-mail, either. Modern nation states rely heavily on the Internet for their governance, military and finance. Politicians need to talk to each other, military commanders send messages constantly, and banks need to get online to make sure that money flows between people who need it. If you have the ability to interfere with these things, you can stall a government, make the military have great difficulties to function and bring economies to a standstill. In the spring of 2007, the Estonian government moved a massive statue that had been installed in one of their cities when their territory was still governed from Soviet Moscow. Russians still living there were outraged and people took to the streets by the thousands in protest. In the back rooms of Russia, though, the hackers also got to work. In what was the first ever sustained cyber attack, Russian hackers built up an army of computers infected with a virus, which they turned on and directed to request information from a number of Estonian government agencies and websites. In what is known as a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDOS), these thousands of machines did the equivalent of dialing phone numbers hundreds of times each minute. This tied up all of the bandwidth the servers have and made websites inaccessible. Even if you canÕt find Estonia on a map, itÕs important to know two things about this attack. The first is that Estonia is a completely wired nation. So much so that it has the nickname ÒE-stonia.Ó Their government has done all it can to put information and services online. An attack like this brought the economy and government to a halt in a few days. The second thing about this attack is that now, a year after the event, computer scientists who have studied it were able to tell that this was not the Russian government who was in control of these attacks Ð it was regular Russian citizens who thought they were doing their part to voice their opinions. So when Russia invaded the Ossetia regions and then Georgia itself over the past several weeks, no one was surprised to see the same thing occurring. Although far less reliant on computers than Estonia, Georgia found itself having a difficult time getting their side of the story out to the world as their communication lines were so clogged with incoming data from denial of service attacks that many journalists had no choice but to wait until things improved before filing their stories. The United States and China both have publicly acknowledged that they have cyberwarfare programs that are meant to be used against other nations if needed. In fact, earlier this year, the US complained loudly that Chinese hackers had already successfully invaded the networks of various Air Force and Infantry divisions as well as their military colleges. Chinese hackers have also posted online their plans for being able to stop entire US fleets of aircraft carriers through hacking into their navigation and machine software. This gets scary very quickly. Even if we arenÕt all geeks, much of our lives are controlled and managed by technology. Banking systems, heating systems in larger buildings, and the tracking and travel of our food supplies (as only a few examples) are all digitally managed. If these things go down, a nation quickly slides into chaos. This is another reality that needs to be acknowledged. The technology itself is neither good nor bad. How we use it makes all the difference. ([email protected]) Tech Notes runs Mondays.
