Cyber warfare is just like…. Pick your poison or bias. Heck pick strategic air warfare, pick some nuclear disarmament, get yourself some armor strategies. Talk about the Maginot line like it is actually a meaningful strategy in a networked world. Totally ignore the reams of academic literature that says “hey this is a new domain” and foist your lackluster stratagems off for your military service. Since civilians aren’t allowed on the Internet anyways.
Cyber warfare is on a purely man made terrain so man controls it… You know cause like subs and cities aren’t man made constructs to operate in environments or represent man made environments. We’d never bomb cities (like we bomb telephone companies), or transition through the natural mediums of oceans using subs (like electrons fold up packets and datagrams). Oh heck we just engaged in myth number 1 darn it.
Cyber warfare is a battlefield of youth because old people can’t program their VCR… Just because you work at Jiffy Lube doesn’t make you an SAE Mechanic to fix my fuel injection. Maybe this is how my Toyota ended up on the recall list? Just because you can play x-box doesn’t mean you can program for it. Software development and the strategies of how software and hardware are implemented are not simplistic. It takes a lot of time to become well versed rather than stove piped in skill. You might learn one attack strategy fairly quickly but cyber warriors are going to need dozens upon dozens of techniques. And, those techniques will make tens-of-thousands of attacks. You don’t learn that in between nappy time and milk and cookies.
Cyber Armageddon is right around the corner… Run away!!! Come on. Does anybody believe this garbage? In Kentucky a few years ago they went without electricity and basic services for weeks after an ice-storm. Nobody cared. New York sees a bump in power and people panic. We have a human agency issue in panic not a cyber issue. Deal with the problem of people and cyber won’t be the vector to the end of the world.
Throwing money at cyber warfare will fix it… Just like it works on leaking oil wells and politicians. Wait.. aww never mind. Forget that we’re talking about a non-hiearchical networked domain that is inherently asymmetrical and that no money in the world will fix the issues.
Cyber warfare poses no threats what so ever… Heck if you don’t mine me reading your email what do you have to worry about. Don’t want me to read your email? To bad you don’t get to have a choice. This is the real risk. Low intensity threats against the legitimacy of systems like banks, and privacy of business communications. Sure a mass casualty event might be possible but what is the margin on that? Give me good ol’ espionage any day. I can ruin your life much easier by posting all your documents to wikileaks.
Most of the talking heads know what they are talking about… No they don’t. 99.9% of them aren’t computer scientists, don’t really understand how the networks operate, and operate off PowerPoint’s put together by other people. They get really good briefing (grammar intact). Or, worse are lawyers or politicians. Something like 2/3rds of the PhD’s in computer security come from Purdue University. Yet that isn’t cyber warfare. Most of the 99.9% blathering heads are self anointed by themselves as experts or come from the information operations or electronic warfare in the military. Yet those two military disciplines are close but no nanner for those monkeys either. Cyber warfare is new, so publish or blow. If you work for a think tank and your initials are JL no nanner for you either.
Cyber warfare is not about simply nationalizing the infrastructure for power hungry bureaucrats who didn’t fancy that Internets stuff anyways… Yeah right. Public policy since the 1970s has been pushing for open standards, an open Internet, and in less than five years almost all of that is un-done. Culminating in a cyber command ran by the most closed agency in US Government (NSA), who is run by a military officer, with other military officers saying join us or be in the Wild West, and legislation talking about nationalizing the whole ball of wax in the works. Wholesale violations of the entirety of the Constitution of the United states because some people are scared bad ol’ hackers will get them. Phooey.
These are the only myths in this messed up money pit of cyber warfare… Yeah right, and this bridge is yours for a meager price.
3 thoughts on “Cyber war myths: Other things nobody cares about”
You sound like someone who’s got it all figured out. Pegged out on the snark scale.
I’d never say I have it all figured out, but I definitely was going for full “snark” or tongue in cheek. Check out some of the other posts in the cyber warfare category if you want a lot of depth.
You mean I won’t learn how to manipulate packets with C++ while surfing Facebook and eating milk and cookies? Shucks…. 😉
You sound like someone who’s got it all figured out. Pegged out on the snark scale.
I’d never say I have it all figured out, but I definitely was going for full “snark” or tongue in cheek. Check out some of the other posts in the cyber warfare category if you want a lot of depth.
You mean I won’t learn how to manipulate packets with C++ while surfing Facebook and eating milk and cookies? Shucks…. 😉