A Look at Stuxnet, the World's First Digital Weapon

Re:A Look at Stuxnet, the World's First Digital Weapon by AlyssaRowan on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @08:15AM (#8556322)

The drawback is that they require systematic vulnerabilities to work; therefore the rhetoric for state-sponsored malware demands systems deliberately be left vulnerable to attack, either by failing to fix vulnerabilities found or deliberately inserting them (as in by backdoors)

This has a global effect. The "enemy" uses the same things you do. A weapon to attack them demands weaknesses in everyone's armour, including your own.

They are so easily reverse-engineered and repurposed to attack you or third parties, so easily developed by low-budget or non-state actors, and so easily misattributed, that they exhibit all the same essential properties as biological weapons.

I think state-sponsored malware should be banned, by international treaty, and I say this as someone with expertise in the field.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A Look at Stuxnet, the World's First Digital Weapon by hawkice on Tuesday November 04, 2014 @09:29AM (#8556611)

So, let's tease out a couple ideas here, that way I can address your core idea at its best.

>They are so easily reverse-engineered and repurposed to attack you

You probably meant just third parties here. No one is checking government machine's patch level and demanding an explanation -- if they have the exploit they probably patched any vulnerable systems before they used it.

> I think state-sponsored malware should be banned, by international treaty

So, espionage is largely _already_ banned by international treaty, including fairly specific rules about how, if you are a soldier down behind enemy lines you can escape using a disguise but not if you are a spy (I hope this conveys how bizarre international law is, the idea that if a spy is caught that their use of a disguise will play a factor in their fate).

Suffice it to say, you want a "soft ban", because you want them to not be used in reality (not just that you don't want them used in threat gestures, etc. -- plus you can't really rely on international law for things like this, as we've seen by recent NSA leaks as well as Merkel's response to learning she was personally wiretapped).

----

Most importantly: you have an argument that is too general. You could make _precisely the same argument_ in defense of banning pistols in any wars. (1) enemy is symmetrically offensive; (2) if there exist defenses, your opponent is likely to use them; (3) this leaves you largely unprotected to isomorphic attacks for all useful versions of this weapon (soldiers can still die from gunshot wounds); (4) similar technology can be devised by your opponents; (5) guns can be developed by low-budget or non-state actors; (6) direct attribution for gun crime is difficult (about half of murders in the US go unsolved, and that's not in a war zone).

So governments paying for pistols is too dangerous and should be "soft banned" or banned by international treaty.

I believe you have a more complex belief that would provide for much better discussion (subject matter experts typically do). Would you mind expanding on your ideas and sharing?

[ Parent | on HN ]