Cyber-Terrorism: I love this quote from Geekonomics
From David Rice’s book “Geekonomics: The Real Cost of Insecure Software”:
“The sad irony is a ‘cyber-terrorist attack’ would be largely indistinguishable from routine software failure. Was it Al Qaeda or another hiccup in the software we are using?”


June 4th, 2008 at 7:32 pm
rofl. Its funny cause its true.
June 4th, 2008 at 8:14 pm
F**** so funny no commentary needed.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
LOL…and again LOL…that is pure gold and so so so true!
June 4th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
The latter we would expect. ROFL. I need to get this book!
Sad but true. Most would not know. I know my place would have no clue.
Just got here from RSnake’s blog and you aussies rock.
June 5th, 2008 at 12:02 am
Ah Ha!….listening to Gunners as I write this..First BOB post….love you dudes! Every other BLOG is going commercial..you guys fucking rock. Where do we go now….where do we go now…..
Love your shit! All quiet on the vuln disclosure end….making money??
June 5th, 2008 at 8:09 am
…with you on that one. Re: vuln disclosure: haven’t changed our policy but who knows given how things are headed.
Thanks JohnnyH. Great to have you here.
June 5th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
We worry a lot about cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism yet we are internally just as big a threat to ourselves with software we buy, write ourselves and the products we deploy to protect ourselves. We now expect and accept mediocrity in software. It doesn’t make sense why we do but we’re now conditioned to it.
We don’t do that with other things in business, and life in general.
June 6th, 2008 at 8:28 am
To be fair, sometimes this ‘oh it was a bug’ is due to a bit of social engineering, as opposed to real software/protocol bugs.
It’s amusing to consider that in order to mitigate that sort of attack, we need to say ‘trust your product more’, but then when the product is actually faulty, we get illegal arrests/firings/whatever and blame them for trusting the product.
June 9th, 2008 at 6:34 pm
@Silky, yeah the risk and liability all sits with the software purchaser if something goes wrong. Software licences take away any blame from the software developer(s). Amazing how that is allowed to continue – it’s 2008. Ever read through a full licencing agreement? Scary stuff.
February 1st, 2009 at 1:19 am
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