18 September, 2016

Welcome to the Dark Net, a Wilderness Where Invisible World Wars Are F | Vanity Fair

Welcome to the Dark Net, a Wilderness Where Invisible World Wars Are F | Vanity Fair: "The botnet it could have created would have been huge. If the Chinese had breached other large Internet companies via the same payment-center route—and it seemed likely they had—the combined effect would have been the creation of by far the largest botnet ever seen, an Internet robot consisting of perhaps 200 million computers, all controlled by one small Chinese hacking team. Opsec had stumbled onto a very big thing. And its lack of use was the key. The only possible purpose, Opsec concluded, was that of a sleeper cell, lying in wait as a pre-positioned asset to be used as a last resort, like a nuclear weapon, in the event of an all-out cyber-war. The world certainly seems to be moving in that direction. Already cyber-attacks constitute an active component of nearly every conventional military battle. They are used by the U.S. in conjunction with the air and ground war against ISIS. Some say that a global cyber-war is already under way, because everyone is getting hacked. But many states—China, Russia, Germany, France, Pakistan, Israel, and the United States—are actively preparing for something much larger to come.

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