Well an argument to this could be that we cant tell its an attack. In a recent report on US weapon systems it was found that even a simple network scan could crash a system.

"Operators reported that they did not suspect a cyber attack because unexplained crashes were normal for the system."

That exerpt comes from this report which was released two months ago.

https://www.gao.gov/assets/700/694913.pdf

We're no longer in a time when Occams razor tells us that the giant radio active spike over the ocean is a nuclear weapons test. Now Occams razor tells us that every crash is simply due to bad hardware or (and sometimes both) a lack of funding.

All you have to do is go look at various bridges across the US, and roads in urban areas too. The simple fact is that the US absolutely refuses to maintain or repair infrastructure. So we have bridges rusting apart and even collapsing sometimes with vehicles on them.

With a national attitude like that, random unexplained crashes of other critical systems shouldn't be a surprise.

>unexplained crashes were normal for the system

this only makes me more concerned

It shouldn't really. If they're really common then everyone already knows how to deal with things when the system crashes, it isn't a big deal. What you need to worry about is what happens when the system that has never crashed and that everyone depends on and no one understands goes down.

Indeed. Degrade infrastructure overnight and it's a terrorist attack. Degrade it over 20 years and it's "small government".

You can affect this as a foreign power. Pay some think tank to produce material for (so called) media outlets.

I am not a US citizen and not living in the US but I can't recall hearing a foreign official or non-official supporting a reduced US government.

US local politicians are vocals enough about it.

Obviously they wouldn't do so under their own names, but through Macedonian troll factories, opaquely funded think tanks, Russia Today interviews, twitter bots, and so on.

I absolutely agree this is a home grown phenomenon but there is some evidence that Russia funneled money to Republicans with these beliefs through the NRA. This is just one example we happen to know about because people are looking under every rock after the 2016 election.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-of-russian-plot-to-inf...

The NRA is a great example of this; its president is Oliver North, famously involved in a plot to sell weapons to one enemy of America to illegally support a terrorist organisation in another. I'm sure such an upstanding person has America's best interests at heart. /s

Oh, that would be doing it wrong. Of course it would be presented as locally written journalism, local experts or "concerned citizens" etc.

I'm not saying it's happening, but I certainly see the potential profitability in it.

I have said this before, but Hanlon's razor is good for politeness, but not very good for assessing what people are actually up to, as people regularly disguise maliciousness as incompetence and find it fun to do so, especially in politics and other power games.

One of the many tricks to power is pleading powerlessness on the things you actually planned ahead of time while claiming full responsibility for things that are accidental.

But what you are describing is already part of the premise of Hanlon's razor. It's true you can't always distinguish maliciousness and incompetence, but incompetence is easier to achieve and so occurs more frequently. That's why any given instance like this is more likely to be incompetence than malice.

It's possible this could be some secret plot disguised as incompetence, but it's also totally reasonable for an event like this to happen from incompetence alone, and I don't think it would surprise anyone if that were the case. So we ought to focus on the reality that this kind of outage is totally possible due to incompetence and implement measures to prevent that.

Not only can you not always distinguish them from each other, but they are very far from being mutually exclusive. Which is somewhere else that Hanlon's razor falls down. It sets them up as being options to choose between, which is obviously a very bad model.

To be honest, when I first heard Hanlon's razor, I immediately wondered what nefarious stuff Hanlon had been up to that he wanted to deflect attention away from.

Is a bit like the old aphorism 'You can't cheat an honest man', which is of most use to con artists trying to put honest people at ease before then cheating them.

edit - also you are misrepresenting Hanlon's razor. It is not an argument that says that stupidity is merely more likely, rather it says - "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity".

>>If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously.

Unless you wanted to send a message about "we can do this too" ...or a response. Lots of things we don't know but a few people in NSA/CIA might know what this is about--if it was done by a foreign power.

But also things happen by random chance.

> If you wanted to test your cyber weapons, I’d imagine you wouldn’t want to draw too much attention to yourself by testing them simultaneously.

True, but that assumes this would be a test rather than an actual attack. There are motives where substantial but non-crippling disruption could be the goal.

You don't test your cyber weapons so anyone notices. It's giving away that you have a weapon and gives your enemy time to adapt and protect themselves. Mabe it's someone tired of the boss not listening to the complaints of potentially crippling bugs in the security and is now doing a presentation of what would happen to society if he does not get to fix the bug?

Or a provider of DDOS-protection that is running their own DDOS botnet for kicks? Mirai comes to mind here... :-)

> You don't test your cyber weapons so anyone notices.

Yes, I know. I'm saying it's not impossible that this is an actual attack, not a test.

If you recall the stuxnet attack against iran, it was israel who went ahead and deployed the attack against the wishes of the nsa - as they were chomping at the bit to test it.

Also, they made their tracks known with Torrah quotes in the code.