CNN We Were Warned: Cyber Shockwave = CyberFAIL

Well, with a little less than a half hour left of CNN’s “Cyber Shockwave: We Were Warned” I see that we as a country are being led by blithering Luddites who are incapable of coming to concise conclusions.

My twitter blow by blow of this show had the tag of #CyberFail and such FAIL it is. Let me sum up the ideas of the stellar panel:

1) Pulling the plug on the internet to prevent the worm from propagating

2) Pulling the plug on people’s cell phones to stop the propagation

3) Nationalizing the TELCO and Power companies

4) Rationing diesel for gennie’s

5) Activating the National Guard or Army internally in the country

6) Rendition of suspected hackers or attackers in other countries

7) Giving the president the option of unilateral disconnect and nationalizing of companies such as the power and telco companies

I have to say that this show scares me more than the technical inequities that exist within the government and corporate sectors to prevent this type of attack from succeeding. These people have no clue about the intricacies of the systems involved nor the core security values that are lacking within them that could prevent this from happening in the first.

I am willing to bet that very few of these people have heard the term “Defense in Depth” and know what it means…

#CyberFail indeed. This whole exercise was only to show how they “might” deal with this if it happened. Nothing to do with how they would or should be moving toward technical and operational means to PREVENT this scenario from happening! This is scary.

Now, in the last few minutes though, they began to talk about regulation of security with the private sector. This was touched on lightly as regulating the secure coding practices of such things as iPhone apps. I agree with this, but this show/scenario is just NOT coming up with the answers that we need.

Suffice to say, as I said before.. We are hosed if someone comes up with a blended attack against our infrastructure. These folks will be sitting in the command bunker being talking heads and naught will get done.

Buy generators, non perishables, ammo, and books on survival kids.