The Hacker Mind Podcast: The Fog of Cyber War
Robert Vamosi
·
July 06, 2022
There’s an online war in Ukraine, one that you haven’t heard much about because that country is holding its own with an army of infosec volunteers worldwide.
Mikko Hypponen joins The Hacker Mind to discuss cybercrime unicorns, the fog of cyber war that surrounds the Ukrainian war with its much larger neighbor, and of course Mikko’s new book, If it’s Smart, it’s Vulnerable.
Vamosi: For most of my career I have speculated when and where there would be an escalation of physical war into the virtual world. A cyberwar. And there’s been a fair amount of hyperbole, such as Richard Clark’s famous “digital pearl harbor” statement, that there would be one clear moment when this would happen. Contrasting that is, perhaps, a more nuanced statement from Howard Schmidt, President Obama’s first cybersecurity czar, who said “We see people talking about the digital Pearl Harbor from the worms and Trojans and viruses. But in all probability, there’s more likelihood of what we call the ‘backhoe attack’ that would have more impact on a region than Code Red, or anything we’ve seen so far.”
What Schmidt was referring to was an incident when a common backhoe severed a strategic Sprint communications line in the United States. That event did more damage than any computer virus or worm at the time. I think event leaves open yet another possibility, that perhaps we’ve…
