US 'to view major cyber attacks as acts of war'

[SamuelRSmith]

kitler53 said:

SamuelRSmith said:

kitler53 said:

Rath said:

This isn't declaring hacking an act of war. It's simply formalising what is already known as cyber warfare as an act of war. It's completely understandable - when a state attacks another state through the internet it still causes damage.

but as lostplanet said above, hackers are generally individuals not states.

We're not talking about events like hacking the PSN, here. We're talking about things like state-on-state cyber attacks: cyber-warfare. The largest cyber attacks always come from the state: Google claimed that last year's attack came from China, the article references Stuxnet, where it was probable that either the USA or Israel tried to cause damage to Iran's systems.

Just by the nature of the fact that the Pentagon has released this shows that more states/large terrorist groups have been trying to hack the USA's computers than what is released to the public.

interesting, maybe i'm just unaware of things.  i'll be honest, until the psn hack that effected me i can't say i really paid attention to hackers.  now that i am, i'm just getting increasingly pissed at how little can be done to protect legitiment interests from malicious hackers.

Well, all defences, both physical and virtual have always had flaws. It's just that virtual defences can be attacked from anywhere, if on the Internet. So rather than you actually having to turn up to a place, and try and infiltrate it there, you can now do it from the comfort of a computer desk. And, with most companies out there, if you fail at hacking the system, they won't even know you're doing it.

Everything designed by man, can be broken by man. When you can do it from a million miles away, with very little risk of getting caught, and computers that can run through code at billions of calculations a second,  the breaking becomes a lot easier.

Really, the world of the 21st century will be very different from that of previous centuries. It's not just hacking: within decades, the knowledge will be out there so that anybody can create their own bioweapon for a couple of hundred dollars. Already, with the technical skills you can build  drones and such with a couple of trips to Radioshack.

Society, as a whole, is going to have to change now that the individual has many abilities that once was only reserved for the largest companies, and Governments.

Watch this: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/ian_goldin_navigating_our_global_future.html