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Strategies & Market Trends : Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: arun gera who wrote (68033)	8/25/2007 3:33:37 AM
From: silenceddissenter	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Live Free or Die Hard (good movie out now - go watch it and tell me what you think) after World War II. Power Vacuums often lead to war - iraq is a smaller example of what may happen on the global scale - The next world war will involve nuclear no? Really ARUN you don't expect the military gung ho types to limit themselves to conventional weapons eh? Do you agree with el mats view that if the empire collapses or is forcibly decimated that we will only have a few 10's of millions in deaths worldwide and then have rebalanced power - if so why would you believe that? Do you think economic hit man perkins is wrong and we should not try to use the empire to spread good like the Republic in Star Wars before emporer palpatine turned to the darkside? Mish says we can't afford to be the worlds police force - but there was a general in canada that headed a UN force that said if we do not - more people are going to die needless deaths all over. The cities I have lived in with an honest police force seems to have kept my muggings and robbings down. If IRAN or china try to block the straits of hormuz or some other thing why would the current holders of power go peacably into the night? Hasn't it been proven that world leaders all over from putin to bush are willing to use violence to achieve their goals? How long do you think it will take for us to come out of the "dark ages" after that? El Mat can run to iran, or brazil, or to disney world in orlando, but is that going to protect him from the floating radiation clouds? Do me a favor - ask elmat why those siemens boys have software problem? forbes.com The first time Scott Lunsford offered to hack into a nuclear power station, he was told it would be impossible. There was no way, the plant's owners claimed, that their critical components could be accessed from the Internet. Lunsford, a researcher for IBM's Internet Security Systems, found otherwise. "It turned out to be one of the easiest penetration tests I'd ever done," he says. "By the first day, we had penetrated the network. Within a week, we were controlling a nuclear power plant. I thought, 'Gosh. This is a big problem.'" In retrospect, Lunsford says--and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission agrees--that government-mandated safeguards would have prevented him from triggering a nuclear meltdown. But he's fairly certain that by accessing controls through the company's network, he could have sabotaged the power supply to a large portion of the state. "It would have been as simple as closing a valve," he says. The disturbingly vulnerable system that Lunsford hijacked is powered by Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition software, or SCADA, a type of software made by companies including Siemens (nyse: SI - news - people ), ABB (nyse: ABB - news - people ), Rockwell Automation (nyse: ROK - news - people ) and Emerson. SCADA systems are used around the country to control infrastructure like water filtration and distribution, trains and subways, natural gas and oil pipelines, and practically every kind of industrial manufacturing. And as some security professionals are pointing out, those weaknesses are increasingly connected to the Internet, leaving large parts of America's critical infrastructure exposed to anyone with moderate information technology training and a laptop. SNIP That means that even if outright attacks aren't increasing, there's a growing threat of extortion, says Paller. In fact, the SANS Institute hosts a crisis response center for cyberattacks, and Paller says he's learned of multiple threats within the last year and a half from hackers claiming to have infiltrated SCADA systems and demanding ransom. Other shakedowns have likely gone unreported. Paller predicts that those incidents will increase. "There's been very active and sophisticated chatter in the hacker community, trading exploits on how to break through capabilities on these systems," he says. "That kind of chatter usually precedes bad things happening." Extortion is more than an economic problem; racketeers could easily trigger an accident while trying to demonstrate control over a facility, says Marcus Ranum, chief security officer for Tenable Security. "To spin a pump or move a valve, you don't have to be a petroleum engineer," he says. "Then again, you could spin the wrong pump and blow something up." Not every SCADA sabotage scenario is so hypothetical. In 2000, Vitek Boden, a 48-year-old man fired from his job at a sewage-treatment plant in Australia, remotely accessed his former workplace's computers and poured toxic sludge into parks and rivers; he hoped the plant would re-hire him to solve the leakage problem.