Politically Motivated Cyber Attacks

Orome1 writes "According to a new report, 53 percent of critical infrastructure providers report that their networks have experienced what they perceived as politically motivated cyber attacks. Participants of the Symantec survey claimed to have experienced such an attack on an average of 10 times in the past five years, incurring an average cost of $850,000 during a period of five years to their businesses. Participants from the energy industry reported that they were best prepared for such an attack, while participants from the communications industry reported that they were the least prepared."

well, you've got to be politically significant...

[Adolf Hitroll]

...unlike Slashdot were bacon and iCraps seem to be the only motivations...

I'll post the obvious....

[AnonymousClown]

Critical infrastructure providers represent industries that are of such importance either to a nation’s economy or society that if their cyber networks were successfully attacked and damaged, the result would threaten national security.

WTF are "critical infrastructure providers" doing by connecting their critical systems to the internet?

If they need to connect plants or other things, leased lines aren't an option?

Re:Terrorism is a result of failed democracy

[ElectricTurtle]

Do you really think that every minority interest group is going to be happy with the consensus of the majority all the time, every time? You talk about the 'principles of free software' as a panacea, ignoring that the free software movement has the same problems. Some person or minority of persons gets upset with decisions made by a larger group of core developers for a project, and what happens? Fork. The only way that government can fork is by 'segregating people' whether done by geography (which is the most logistically accommodating) or by some as-yet-untried model such as panarchism [wikipedia.org] (which would be a logistical nightmare).

The fact about humans is that you can never please all of the people all of the time. No matter how reasonable a given consensus is, there will always be a minority that feels otherwise, and because there are always a few people playing without a full deck, an even smaller subset of a given minority may be emotional enough to think it's worth killing over. That's not a 'failure of democracy', that's life. Deal with it.

DDOS attacks as protests?

[Anonymous Coward]

DOSS attacks could be the new form of protests. They could have the same protections as regular protests. They would have to be announced and could last for a limited number of hours per day.

Regular protest cause financial loss anyway, so there's no difference there. But unlike the regular protests people from around the world could participate easily. The media would cover the protest just like any other, so you'd get attention to the issue as well.

It's what anonymous already does in a way - they announce their ddos attacks in a public call to arms.