The September issue of Wired is, as usual, chockablock with SWR—stuff worth reading. I was “taken” (mesmerized!) by “WWI,” the story of last May’s full-fledged cyberattack (“botnet attack”) on Estonia, the most wired country in Europe. Among the savvy members of this Blog community, perhaps I’m the last to know the story—but the “imbedded journalist” (more or less) tale of the attack, a true attack on national sovereignty orchestrated by the Estonians moving a WWII Russian war memorial, was stunning in both the details and the implications thereof.
If you buy the journalists’ story—and I can’t see why one wouldn’t—this was indeed WWI, and we are woefully unprepared, and in fact uninterested in being prepared on an appropriate scale, for what will doubtless be a Dark Black Swan in our collective futures, tomorrow at dawn or a decade from now. The results of said failure to prepare on an appropriate (BIG!) scale could be calamitous.
Sad to say, the lack of attentiveness to the cyberassault problem, like the ineffectualness of many of our anti-terrorist measures, heats up the “survivalist” in me—which ain’t so pretty.