Policy Review: Botnets are eWMD, electronic Weapons of Mass Destruction

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Policy Review: Botnets are eWMD, electronic Weapons of Mass Destruction

By CircleID Reporter
December 10, 2008, 5:40 pm PST Views: 5,049 Add Comment

The latest issue of Policy Review from the Hoover Institution, a public policy research center—focused on advanced study of politics, economics, and political economy—has an essay titled eWMDs – electronic weapons of mass destruction. The Policiy Review readers are warned that botnets should be considered a serious security problem and that “cyber attacks present a grave new security vulnerability for all nations and must be urgently addressed.” From the paper:

“Just as the Internet has enabled eCommerce, it has also enabled cyber crime, cyber terrorism, and cyber warfare. Unfortunately, the international community’s response to these dangers has been seriously insufficient. Botnets have the potential to do untold damage, and they should be classified as ewmds (electronic Weapons of Mass Destruction), a term we have coined. We believe it is appropriate to have a category distinction. wmds can kill in large numbers and cause great disruption. Computers are not generally configured so that they can cause physical damage to themselves or their surroundings, though there is concern about scada systems (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition)—the computer systems that control utilities and process plants in general. The cia recently disclosed that electric utilities have been successfully attacked. But even if all software and data are securely backed up, there is still potential for great loss due to an ewmd attack.”

Read the full essay on Hoover Institution’s Policy Review website.

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By CircleID Reporter — CircleID’s internal staff reporting on news tips and developing stories. Do you have information the professional Internet community should be aware of? Contact us.
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