Submission + - Western governments will use botnets in cyber wars (techeye.net)
bossanovalithium writes: Cameron has announced Whitehall will spend £1 billion on "cyber defence". A Home Security spokesman in the US has said that it needs to wise up the cyber threat. We've been talking to some cyber security experts, anonymous and with either direct access to, or access to those with direct access to, top level government agencies in both the United States and the UK. Guess what? Defence don't mean defence.
Meetings have been going on and continue about the possibilities of using cyber attacks as weapons. We're not just talking Stuxnet, which is believed by many to have come from Israel, China or the US to sabotage Iranian and/or Indian infrastructure, but botnets too. "Defence" agents don't just want to know how to neutralise a threat, but how to gain access to and control the world's largest botnets to point at who they need to.
"You would be a fool," one source suggested to us this week, "to think that governments are not considering the applications for cyber warfare."
Earlier on in the week someone else close to the matter, who also wished to be anonymous — you'd be mad not to remain anonymous — told us that attacks on hospitals and power grids are "likely". In fact attacks on hospitals are happening already. All of this must be kept under wraps — if attackers know they're causing trouble that's cause for celebr
Meetings have been going on and continue about the possibilities of using cyber attacks as weapons. We're not just talking Stuxnet, which is believed by many to have come from Israel, China or the US to sabotage Iranian and/or Indian infrastructure, but botnets too. "Defence" agents don't just want to know how to neutralise a threat, but how to gain access to and control the world's largest botnets to point at who they need to.
"You would be a fool," one source suggested to us this week, "to think that governments are not considering the applications for cyber warfare."
Earlier on in the week someone else close to the matter, who also wished to be anonymous — you'd be mad not to remain anonymous — told us that attacks on hospitals and power grids are "likely". In fact attacks on hospitals are happening already. All of this must be kept under wraps — if attackers know they're causing trouble that's cause for celebr