If you listen to NPR as much as the next, you may have realized the significant slant on this afternoons on-point: Cyber Warfare, with Tom Ashbrook on WBUR.

Most of the callers and comments on the air floored me to blog. I wanted to torch some of the comments left on Tom’s blog, I laughed. My outrage roots from “expert” Scott Borg’s (“director and chief economist at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit“) claim that all of the recent and theoretical cyber-security attacks on the pentagon, google, nuke plants are because of a flaw that fundamentally: sits between the monitor and the seat. (heh) Mr. Borg is obtuse to many facts. His sources are from CNET, HAK5 or from the Pentagon. With respect, the Pentagon has obviously shared less information about the lost laptops than the next.

Mr. Borg continued to instigate fear and global cyber warfare propaganda. Advocating a federal “identification” protocol for the internet is only interesting if you are reading 1984 or you are the CEO of USCCU.
The public should at least be informed of the defensive theorem. It hit me when Mr. Borg attempted to divulge security flaws in the United States IT infrastructure. His examples of actual vulnerabilities can simply be classified as: UNAMERICAN

What would a nuclear security engineer have to say…?

The segment on cyber-attacks, and the vulnerability of power plants to these attacks, was inaccurate, a fact which I tried to clarify when I called in. The gentleman who spoke to my point right afterwards skirted around the fact that a physical presence from an attacker, as well as intimate knowledge of the plant itself, is entirely necessary. The level of knowledge required would be next-to-impossible for someone to obtain, as it would consist of both physical, electrical, and software design documentation. The alarmist viewpoints presented by the gentleman are, as an engineer of the systems, offensive to me.

I will not, however, speak against an improvement of physical security at power generation facilities. However, that diverges from the topic of your show.

As a listener, I think it is necessary to clarify these points. It makes me question the dependability of the “experts” that editorialize on the topics of your show. For example, it is in Scott Borg’s best interests, as a security consultant, to produce public concern and fear of these nearly impossible, and highly improbable events. In other words, it’s his job to produce the “worst case scenarios” and present them not only as possible, but probable.
Posted by Nicholas, on December 8th, 2008 at 11:06 am UTC