Ryan W Smith

I came across an article today called “10 easy steps to writing the scariest cyberwarfare article ever”. It’s written in a tongue in cheek manner, but there’s a lot of truth to it, everywhere you look there’s another article about how the boogeymen are going to take over the Internet.



The truth of the matter is, there are a lot of highly (and not so highly) skilled people who wish to use our dear Internet for their own nefarious purposes. Despite what the media would make it seem, this is nothing new. This has been going on since two computers were connected to each other, before that people attacked the phone system, and so the story goes for whatever the technology of the time may be. What is new is that nation states are now publicly suspected to be behind some of the larger attacks (like the recect GhostNet that spied on the Dalai Lama, or the attacks on the electrical grid). While I’m not denying that this is a serious concern, I am concerned that the media is sensationalizing the issue, making it harder for the average citizen to separate the true concerns from the FUD.



On the one hand I’m glad that people are finally becoming aware of some of the issues surrounding cyber security, and hopefully they’ll also put some resources behind it, but on the other hand I hate to see the lack, twisting, or misuse of facts used just to scare someone into doing what you want them to do. So those of you reading the news, take it with a grain of salt… the sky isn’t falling, it’s just a little rain (and the occasional tornado :). Those of you with enough knowledge and ability to write about cyberwarfare in an intelligent manner should take it upon yourself to write a factual interpretation of the events to offset the deluge of FUD coming from most major news sources.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 27th, 2009 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Cyberwarfare, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.