How vulnerable is the internet?
Posted: June 30th, 2017, 12:09 am
I understand nothing at all about how ransomware and other malware is designed to bypass security mechanisms, but the last two widely reported attempts seem to have been remarkably successful in technical terms if not financial ones.
It sounds particularly alarming to me as a layman that the very recent NotPetya attack appears to have succeeded against computers that had presumably updated the latest Windows patches.
So my basic question to those who understand such matters is whether a hostile government with effectively unlimited resources and able to hire the best technical skills in the world could design and launch a program that could cause widespread and permanent destruction of data - in effect to cripple entire sections of the internet.
On the face of it I would have thought that a more powerful and sophisticated version of the recent ransomware could be used but without any ransom element - destruction for the sake of destruction and for political / military reasons. Indeed, it seems that the NotPetya attack may have been just such an attack, as the ransom element apparently didn't work and may have been included just to disguise the motives of those who launched the attack.
And following on from my original question, as on the face of it such a program would attack the attacker just as much as the victims, would it be possible to target it solely at a particular country or countries?
It sounds particularly alarming to me as a layman that the very recent NotPetya attack appears to have succeeded against computers that had presumably updated the latest Windows patches.
So my basic question to those who understand such matters is whether a hostile government with effectively unlimited resources and able to hire the best technical skills in the world could design and launch a program that could cause widespread and permanent destruction of data - in effect to cripple entire sections of the internet.
On the face of it I would have thought that a more powerful and sophisticated version of the recent ransomware could be used but without any ransom element - destruction for the sake of destruction and for political / military reasons. Indeed, it seems that the NotPetya attack may have been just such an attack, as the ransom element apparently didn't work and may have been included just to disguise the motives of those who launched the attack.
And following on from my original question, as on the face of it such a program would attack the attacker just as much as the victims, would it be possible to target it solely at a particular country or countries?