In the after-crisis of the Stuxnet worm, Governments around the world are mobilizing to be better prepared against CyberThreats and CyberWar.
It's becoming clear, more and more that groups pf individuals with a lot of knowledge, time and motivation can do harm against economies, healthcare, utilities and other systems, being responsible (who knows?) for the collapse of a country.
We already had, in the past, cases of well succeeded CyberAttacks that collapsed a country information structure and paralyzed it for a while. We can remember of:
- 2007 CyberAttakcs on Estonia
- 2007 CyberAttacks against Syria Radar Infrastructure
- 2008 CyberAttacks on Georgia
- 2010 Stuxnet Worm
Based on this kind of attack, in 2009, President Barack Obama declared America’s digital infrastructure to be a "strategic national asset," and in May 2010 the Pentagon set up its new U.S. Cyber Command.
Other governments are doing the same.
We can predict "or guess" that soon or later, Telecommunication and utilities companies will have military network devices tapped or deployed in-line in their network being monitored and managed by military personal that in case of a threat will analyze, mitigate, block or even shutdown traffic.
It's kind on natural to me. Internet is evolving. Security is at the top of many people agendas.
Deploy additional protection for strategic points is an smart course of action.
The question is:
How far we would go in to the "hobbit hole"?. Will these systems be used only for defense?
Can countries like Egypt use those "defense technologies" to shut down the voice of people like they did days ago?
I hope not.
But we should keep an eye on it.
Just in case.
By the way, Egypt shut down their DNS Servers and stopped advertising BGP routes. The basic stuff, they did not used any "out of this world technology" like our press stated on some news.