~ hehe "some~body's" IS map'in the INTERNET ...y ?
V.T. spotted this story: it appears that last Sunday google cloud went down. That sparked some speculation from Zero Hedge: was someone testing the alleged "internet kill switch"?
As one can tell from the screen captures
that accompanied the article, the outage took down google cloud and
several other sites that use it, and the outage covered a significant
portion the northeastern United States, a portion of southeastern
Canada, and some of western Europe.
Doubtless we'll inevitably hear that this was caused by our good old friend, the glitch ex machina,
that serve-all explain-nothing "explanation" usually resorted to by the
powers that be to pretend like they're not alarmed, and have everything
under control. Zero Hedge, however, is at least raising the
issue, and it's the same issue I and others have been trying to warn
people about: cyber systems simply are not secure; with enough expertise and know-how, they can be hacked.
What concerns me here is a very different question, and that's the assumption that is implicit in the title of the Zero Hedge article:
"Did the government just test the internet kill switch?" But why need
it be the US government? Virtually any government might sponsor
cyber-warfare, and Russia and China are known to have large contingents
of cyber-warfare experts in their intelligence "communities," and one
may make a fair assumption that most other major powers do too. Nor
should one rule out the possibility that major corporations and other
extra-territorial and non-state actors are doing this type of work as
well. This leads me to my next point and high octane speculation of the
day:
I've entertained the idea in previous such "hacking events" that someone appeared to be reconnoitering the architecture
of the internet, learning gateways, crucial nodal points, network
connections, and so on, and that's the impression I get from this story.
Almost any entity with a commercial or national security interest would
be interested in known as much as possible about the exact structure
and architecture of the internet, particularly is it was developing
cyber warfare and counter-warfare capabilities; maximizing damage to a
potential opponent, and minimizing blowback damage to oneself, would be a
necessity of such a program, and that, in turn, would necessitate
events such as this. Nor would this activity be limited merely to the
standard image of cyber-warfare of a team of computer geeks sitting in
front of their monitors, typing and wreaking chaos. Internet
architecture includes the hardware: the cables, gateway computers,
satellites, and so on. In this respect, I've speculated that the attacks
on internet cable both in the San Francisco-Bay area, and in Arizona, a
couple of years ago, may also have been a part of this effort.
All of this makes me suspect that it is not
the US government testing things. And there's a final, all-important
reason that I suspect one should cast suspicion on other actors: the
up-coming JEDI contract. Last week I blogged about this important but
little-talked about subject: the US military in effect wants to move a
significant amount of its data and command-control functions to "the
cloud." The contract will be worth billions to whomever is awarded it.
But this recent attack on the googlecloud only exposes the vulnerabilty
of cyber systems, the very last thing that one would think the US military would want to expose right now. Of course, it is possible that some such test of security was being conducted, but again, it would seem to defeat the purpose.
So, I'm left with yet another data-point
in my (admittedly "out there") speculation that someone appears to be
reconnoitering the architecture of the internet; literally creating a map of the structure.
The real question is who, and for what ultimate purpose?
That I'll leave up to you. https://gizadeathstar.com/2019/06/kill-switch-test-or-something-else/
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