WarSclerotic

Robby is long gone and the mouse is roaring for real.

IN MAY, I wrote about cyber terrorism and hacking. It turns out what I wrote was mild. We appear now to be in an accelerated international cyber war, undeclared and anonymous.

World leaders are grappling with this new kind of war. Unable to police the internet, governments may eventually close it down to save lives. Virulent “malware” is out of control, transferred by the internet or hard drives.

I first got a thrill from robots as a kid watching Robby the Robot in MGM’s Forbidden Planet. Robby was programmed so he would never kill a human. I then graduated to HAL, the first celebrity rogue computer, in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Soft spoken, campy HAL turned psycho on his human crew, foreshadowing hostile cyber attacks. Then the mad heterosexual computer Proteus, in Demon Seed, opted to impregnate Julie Christie, the first digital rape on screen.

Today, the keyboard is snarling and the mouse is roaring for real. The terrifying, weirdly named Stuxnet is a digital attack entity that infiltrates computers and can disastrously interrupt and change instructions in industrial machines. MGM didn’t create this one. Stuxnet appeared worldwide, but mostly in Iran. The conspiracy theorists are salivating about the prospect of the US or Israel as the culprit. But no one knows where it came from or where it’s going. Stuxnet has no voice, silently recreates and multiplies itself ad infinitum.

Britain’s Financial Times and others made this “logic bomb” front page last week, revealing that the complexity of this fiendish creation and its grasp of Microsoft Windows and Siemens systems shouts of substantial resources behind it to hack these giants. Stuxnet infiltrates industrial computers, finds Siemens software and sends new instructions, reverses commands and disrupts operations. Experts posit the virus would take at least 10 programmers six months of full-time work to create.

Symantec claims nearly 60 er cent of computers in Iran are infected, implying a possible concerted attack on that country’s infrastructure. According to National Public Radio in the US, governments are pushing for a cyber-disarmament agreement to control the net. Even tweeting is regarded by some countries as ideological or other warfare.

Russia, for example, raised cyber warfare as a problem in 1998. Cyber security is a worldwide emergency.

Stuxnet’s news debut reflected intelligence alarms underlining the stark reality of active cyber war. Science fiction morphs to science fact and when some horrible geeks create silent, self-reproducing computers to kill humans, films like A Space Odyssey start looking like the History Channel.

The success of the internet is based on the fact that no one really owns it. Governments of any ideological bent, from democratic to autocratic, simply detest this aspect. By definition, governments want control in various degrees over their own population. Now, control of the internet is a national security issue for governments.

Freedom of information on the net could disappear fast once digital murders erupt. The cyber-killer viruses use computers and the internet to violate the society generously allowing them access.

The lone eccentric hacking into the Pentagon to find photos of aliens is history. Known nations – state hackers – are also with us. Earlier in the year China was accused of launching myriad cyber attacks on Western sites to spy and/or disrupt. But these digital attacks are technically without a home address.

So far, it appears that the cyber war has fewer casualties than a weekend in Afghanistan. But it’s only a matter of time until some militarised geeks actually kill people with rogue missions.

The Manhattan Project to create the atomic bomb in the 1940s was a well-kept secret, so one can assume any ultra cyber virus, or weaponised digital element, would be under wraps. We know these computer viruses act like search-and-destroy aliens, can hide out, camouflage themselves, and operate HAL-like independently of the computer user. Technology in warfare is nothing new, and computers themselves advanced in huge jumps in World War II. So you could argue the first essential computer victory was the Allied win in WWII.

Like all wars, this one may cost us some freedoms to win.

This entry was posted on October 2, 2010 at 6:06 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.