Sabotaging The System on 60 Minutes 11/08/09

[HELLRAISER]

anyone else besides me watch this tonight? it seemed like they should have made it last longer

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/60_min...d1lD6gU774_Ni1AUDB5&category=recent&play=true

 

[pancha]

I saw part of it. Its pretty fucked up how easily someone could hack in and screw things up so bad!!!

 

[HELLRAISER]

damn! i'm clicking the link in the first post to see if I can watch this segment but it keeps going to CBS's homepage

anyone else having the same problem as I am or are you able to watch this?

 

[Rey C.]

I watched it. And it was VERY disturbing. What with all of the chest pounding by the Bush Administration about addressing potential terrorist threats, it amazed me that not only was a blind eye turned to this issue, but various people went before Congress and actually lied about working on it. And that foreign agents made it into the DoD and other highly sensitive government computer systems, and lived there for a few days, downloading terabytes of data?! Oh well, so much for America being safer.

Say, what did you think about the experiment where the "hacker" made that generator self-destruct? :eek: That would be a nice thing to have happen in late January on the East coast, eh? It would only take two or three months to get another generator... from outside the U.S. :o

 

[HELLRAISER]

^ I was shocked and awed when they showed hackers causing that generator to go kaboom and I had to drink a beer after seeing that.

lol why in the east coast? I say the southern states since there's many people there who want to secede from the U.S.

 

[HELLRAISER]

oh shit I just found it on youtube:

 

[Rey C.]

^ I was shocked and awed when they showed hackers causing that generator to go kaboom and I had to drink a beer after seeing that.

Yeah, that really bothered me too. In addition to learning that foreign agents (the Chinese most likely) had gained full access to some very sensitive systems. China attacks Europe (let's imagine) and all of our missiles fly up in the air and go POOF, like Wile E. Coyote's Roadrunner rockets. To me, that seems like a major problem. But to those in the military industrial complex, I guess not so much. :dunno:

lol why in the east coast? I say the southern states since there's many people there who want to secede from the U.S.

Well, whoever did it would probably want to take credit. If they hit the south, the Evangelicals would blame it on The End of Days brought about by the anti-Christ, Obama. Seriously, I'm not joking there.

Course, the real reason is hitting the East coast would shut down not just the stock exchanges and the financial center of the free world, but also freeze a lot of people to death, if it went on for more than a few days in the dead of winter.

And yet, there was no way to bring the people who lied about what they'd (supposedly) done to correct this problem up on contempt charges???

 

[CunningStunts]

Don't worry about it guys... now that Bush is out of the picture, B. Hussein Obama is going to fix everything. Trust him.

 

[HELLRAISER]

^ Allah Akbar!

Yeah, that really bothered me too. In addition to learning that foreign agents (the Chinese most likely) had gained full access to some very sensitive systems. China attacks Europe (let's imagine) and all of our missiles fly up in the air and go POOF, like Wile E. Coyote's Roadrunner rockets. To me, that seems like a major problem. But to those in the military industrial complex, I guess not so much. :dunno:

Well, whoever did it would probably want to take credit. If they hit the south, the Evangelicals would blame it on The End of Days brought about by the anti-Christ, Obama. Seriously, I'm not joking there.

Course, the real reason is hitting the East coast would shut down not just the stock exchanges and the financial center of the free world, but also freeze a lot of people to death, if it went on for more than a few days in the dead of winter.

And yet, there was no way to bring the people who lied about what they'd (supposedly) done to correct this problem up on contempt charges???

It's not just foreigners who are hacking away at other countries infrastructures, hackers within the U.S. are also doing the same thing so the threat is both external and internal.

So what if those Evangelicals claim Jesus has brought Armegeddon to their doorstep at least part of their dream will come true but it won't be made true by God.

Yeah, it was great to see Congress yet again do nothing to get industries to improve the security of their systems which are embedded into our infrastructure

 

[Rey C.]

It's not just foreigners who are hacking away at other countries infrastructures, hackers within the U.S. are also doing the same thing so the threat is both external and internal.

So what if those Evangelicals claim Jesus has brought Armegeddon to their doorstep at least part of their dream will come true but it won't be made true by God.

Yeah, it was great to see Congress yet again do nothing to get industries to improve the security of their systems which are embedded into our infrastructure

Yeah, I caught that on the presentation: we do it to them and they do it back to us. But as the one gentleman said, we've interwoven the internet into our systems so completely that we're much more vulnerable than "they" are - and we don't even know who they are much of the time. :wtf:

And yeah, it could be the Chinese, the North Koreans, the Italian or the Russo-Israeli mafias. It could be any group with the sophistication to pull it off. Imagine if one of these groups sold S&P500 futures short over the course of a week or two, and then zapped our power grid. :eek: Not a bad way to make a few billion on the quick, eh? I've read rumors that there was a lot of mysterious short selling and trading activity in the weeks prior to the 9/11 and London attacks. And that's to say nothing of the millions that are stolen from banks and brokerages every year - I think they touched on that during the 60 Minutes show too.

It really amazes me that with all of the Homeland Security stuff that went on over the past 6 or 7 years, this was allowed to go on, with virtually nothing being done. And then people were allowed to LIE about it, on top of not doing anything???!!!

Unless my number is up anyway, and I just happen to be in a McDonalds or a shopping mall when some nutball sets off his suicide bomb, I've just never felt that a random terrorist act was going to personally affect me, or even the average American (other than being shocked). But if someone could shut down the power grid in the dead of winter or kick the shit out of the financial system with some sort of DNS attack, that would be (IMO) a more effective, long term terrorist act than 20 suicide bombings in our major cities.

When someone can hit you, shut you down and kill your people, without losing even a single one of their own, that's pretty damn scary. Especially if they can do it and you can't even figure out who did it.

 

[HELLRAISER]

^ so true and Bush's Homeland Security was a bunch of baloney.

From time to time whenever I have gone to a library, I've found floppy discs, flash drives and cd-r lying around assuming someone forgot them after they were finished using the computer station I'm at, but after watching this segment, I've been wondering if they were intentionally left with malicious script codes and viruses for some unsuspecting doof to take home and install on their personal computer

 

[Rey C.]

^ so true and Bush's Homeland Security was a bunch of baloney.

From time to time whenever I have gone to a library, I've found floppy discs, flash drives and cd-r lying around assuming someone forgot them after they were finished using the computer station I'm at, but after watching this segment, I've been wondering if they were intentionally left with malicious script codes and viruses for some unsuspecting doof to take home and install on their personal computer

Can you believe that something as simple as that allowed whoever this was to basically take up residence inside the Pentagon for a few days??? :wtf:

This is seriously the kind of stuff that we shoud be worried about. Yet, no one really is. Just boggles the mind. It really does. :dunno:

 

[knowone]

This has been going on for decades! The "wire fraud" that John Drapper (Capt Crunch) went to prison for in '77 was (according to 3 connected sources I had) for "hacking into the Pentagon computer system, and getting all the way in."

 

[Rey C.]

This has been going on for decades! The "wire fraud" that John Drapper (Capt Crunch) went to prison for in '77 was (according to 3 connected sources I had) for "hacking into the Pentagon computer system, and getting all the way in."

Yes, I realize that espionage is as old as civilization itself. But from 1977 to 2009, the systems are many times more sophisticated and allow much more control now - the internet, as we know it, didn't even exist in 1977. And as was pointed out in the 60 Minutes piece, we're much more vulnerable than most countries, just because of how tied in our particular systems are.

I'm just saying that anyone who saw that show, and who has a concern about domestic security (the only type that I really have a major concern about), would be shocked at how vulnerable we are... and for most of this decade, no one seemed to give a crap. But some hick town in Bumfuck, Alabama uses govt. grants to buy an armored personel carrier and MP5 submachine guns in the name of Homeland Security? :dunno: