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New amateur face
of cyber war
n Private firm launches space capsule for NASA
THIS UNIVERSE |
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New amateur face
of cyber war THE website attacks launched by supporters of WikiLeaks show 21st-century cyber warfare evolving into a more amateur and anarchic affair than many predicted. While most countries have ploughed much more attention and resources into cyber security in recent years, most of the debate has focused on the threat from militant groups such as al-Qaeda or mainstream state on state conflict. But attempts to silence WikiLeaks after the leaking of some 250,000 classified State Department cables seem to have produced something rather different—something of a popular rebellion amongst hundreds or thousands of tech-savvy activists. “The first serious infowar is now engaged,” former Grateful Dead lyricist, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation John Perry Barlow told his followers on Twitter last week. “The field of battle is WikiLeaks. You are the troops.” Some of the more militant elements on the Internet clearly took him at his word. A group, calling itself Anonymous, put the quote at the top of a webpage entitled “Operation Avenge Assange”, referring to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Online collective Anonymous appears to be using social networking site Twitter to coordinate attacks on websites belonging to entities it views as trying to silence WikiLeaks. Targets have included MasterCard, Visa and a Swiss bank. All blocked payments to Wikileaks on apparent US pressure. Swedish prosecutors behind Assange’s arrest in London for extradition and questioning over sex charges were also hit. Some Wikileaks supporters view the charges are politically motivated. It looks to have surprised even Barlow, whose “declaration of independence for cyberspace” has been increasingly shared over Twitter by Anonymous supporters. He says he himself opposes distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at knocking down sites, viewing them as anti-free-speech. “I support freedom of expression, no matter whose, so I oppose DDoS attacks regardless of their target,” he told Reuters in an email. “They’re the poison gas of cyberspace.... All that said, I suspect the attacks may continue until Assange is free and WikiLeaks is not under continuous assault.” The exchange suggests cyber warfare could also become the preserve of small groups attacking each other as state actors. Alongside possible financial losses from sites being taken down, the potential reputational damage to firms is massive. MasterCard has been mocked widely across the Net as users lampooned its distinctive advertising slogans: “Freedom of speech: priceless. For everything else, there’s MasterCard”. “This proves without question the power at people’s fingertips—that there is high risk and vulnerability on the Internet,” said John Walker, chief technology officer at cyber security company Secure Bastion. “If an organisation like MasterCard with big computing power can have its site taken down, then what about smaller organisations and ordinary people?” While most denial of service attacks use “botnets” to hijack other computers to overload websites, cyber security experts said these attacks were different. Attackers were using their own computers, downloading software from Anonymous. By midway through Wednesday afternoon, that software had already been downloaded some 6,000 times. “This whole ... episode is causing a snowball effect,” said Noa Bar Yosef, senior security strategist from Imperva. “The more attention it is receiving, the more people who are joining the voluntary botnet to cause the DDoS.” WikiLeaks itself has also complained it has been under similar cyber attacks since shortly before it released the documents last week. “I think an interesting development is what we might term the ‘Thomas a Becket’ syndrome,” said Nikolas Gvosdev, professor of national security at the US Naval War College. Becket was the 12th-century Archbishop of Canterbury murdered by four knights who reportedly overheard Henry II’s complaints over him and took them as a royal wish he be killed — an alarming historical example of unintended consequences.
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Trends CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida: A privately owned company put a spacecraft into orbit and brought it back safely on Wednesday in a groundbreaking test-flight that NASA hopes will lead to cargo runs to the International Space Station after the space shuttles are retired next year. The NASA-backed mission was designed to try out a new system for delivering cargo, and possibly crew someday, to the orbital outpost. It was the first time a private company launched and returned a capsule from orbit. Africa’s ‘terrible hairy fly’ found in Kenya NAIROBI: Scientists in Kenya have located one of the world’s rarest and oddest-looking flies after a long hunt for an insect dubbed the “terrible hairy fly,” experts said on Wednesday. Scientists first stumbled across the yellow-haired fly in 1933 and then again in 1948. Since then, at least half a dozen expeditions have visited a site between the towns of Thika and Garissa to find it again. US gets medical isotope from low-grade uranium CHICAGO:
A US company has received the first batch of medical isotopes made from low-grade uranium instead of weapons-grade material, a shift that could help cut the threat of nuclear proliferation, the National Nuclear Security Administration said. NNSA, part of the US Department of Energy, said NTP Radioisotopes Ltd in South Africa delivered a large shipment of the medical isotope molybdenum-99 made from low-grade uranium to privately held Lantheus Medical, which processes the material for medical tests. Scientists on way to solving anti-matter mystery GENEVA: European scientists have reported the creation and capture of anti-hydrogen atoms in a novel magnetic trap and said it put them on track to solving one of the great cosmic mysteries-the make-up of anti-matter. Anti-matter is of intense interest outside the global scientific community because it has often been cited as a potential source of boundless and almost cost-free energy.— Reuters |
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THIS UNIVERSE While the radiations of the sun can enter the windowpanes of a car, causing the greenhouse effect, why can’t they get out? You have to realise that the radiation that enters the windowpanes of a car has a frequency spectrum very different from that which attempts to get out. The incoming radiation, much of it in optical range, is characteristic of a body at a temperature of a few thousand degrees, namely the surface of the sun. But inside the car, it is converted into ordinary room temperature radiation which peaks in the infrared range. At this wavelength, the glass of the window is not so transparent and the radiation gets trapped in. This phenomenon is similar to the one that is causing global warming of the earth. Why is pulling easier than pushing? This is because when you push, for example, a box lying on the ground, some component of your force increases the effective weight of the box. This increases the frictional force that you have to overcome. Why do air bubbles stick to the walls of a tumbler containing water? I think the reason for this might lie in the following fact: When we fill a glass with water from a tap or a jug, there is lot of air dissolved in water. If there are small imperfections in the surface of the glass, micro air bubbles tend to come out like minor seeds to form larger bubbles. This is like sucking out the air that is dissolved in water. This happens less when the glass surface is perfectly clean. You must have noticed gas bubbles coming out of a freshly opened soda water bottle also staying stuck to the sides of the bottle. Readers wanting to ask Prof Yash Pal a question can e-mail him at
palyash.pal@gmail.com |
The website attacks launched by supporters of WikiLeaks show 21st-century cyber warfare evolving into a more amateur and anarchic affair than many predicted.
While most countries have ploughed much more attention and resources into cyber security in recent years, most of the debate has focused on the threat from militant groups such as
al-Qaeda or mainstream state on state conflict.
