Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World Page #7

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gets to the refrigerator...

he just goes... he goes "what the f***?"

You know, he's pissed because they

obviously knew I knew they were coming,

so they were not happy.

I was arrested and I was in court

and I thought I was going home that day

and then this federal prosecutor

tells the judge

that we not only have to

hold Mr. Mitnick without bail

but we have to make sure

he can't get to a telephone.

And I was really paying

attention at this point,

and then the prosecutor

starts telling the judge

that if we let Mr. Mitnick

near a telephone,

he can dial up to NORAD, dial up the modem,

whistle into the phone and launch an ICBM.

Facing 400 years in prison

I had nothing to lose.

I ended up being held in federal prison

without bail in solitary

confinement for a year.

After his time in solitary,

Mitnick languished four more

years in federal prison.

Because the internet was designed

for a community that trusted each other

it didn't have a lot of protections in it.

Uh, we didn't worry about spying

on each other, for example.

We didn't worry about

somebody sending out to us spam

or bad emails or viruses because

such a person would have been,

you know, banned from the community.

It would be really nice when I got a message

if I knew where the message came from.

But the way that the protocols

of the internet work,

that's fundamentally impossible.

And so I kind of have

to look at the message and guess,

is this somebody pretending

to be somebody else.

We can design systems

that are really anonymous

or that are utterly identifiable

down to the person

and it's time for us to think about what

contexts we'd want to support what.

A system that is utterly identifiable

at all times is a nightmare.

It's exactly what we don't

want to hand a country

that doesn't embrace the rule of law...

ready made for them to

employ with their populace.

At the same time, a system that can provide

no accountability at all...

We have pockets of that online

and most people do not find that appealing.

In any frontier, before the law gets there,

there's always people seeking

to take advantage of the system.

I've seen in the United

States, for instance,

probably something like five

or six billion identities lost

but there aren't that

many people in the United States

which makes everyone a little

inured to it every time.

What does it really mean when they hear

their identity's been compromised?

It's not always an identity

compromising totality.

Sometimes it's just a small portion of it.

Your identity comprises many, many things.

There is one you and

there are many components

that represent you digitally.

Some compromises in that system have very

little impact on you, and some huge,

but the line between your physical life

and digital life is

becoming far more blurred

and there will come a point

where the threats online

will hamper your ability

to embrace new technology.

That's what my colleagues

and I have to push back.

Governments who can achieve

all the same effects they would

for international affairs

or foreign affairs

without having to rely on tools of war...

it's another tool at the table, right?

War is an extension of

politics by other means?

Well, now there's another

one with much less risk,

easier to fund, and it puts even some

smaller nation states on the same

playing field as larger ones.

So dozens of nation

states have an ability to hack others

and they use this as an extension

of foreign policy.

We became curious to look into

the biggest cyber attack known until today.

You were at the Sandia National Laboratory.

What sort of a company is

Sandia, can you explain?

Sure. Sandia National Laboratories

is a government research laboratory,

a Department of Energy Research laboratory

that does work in the national interests:

weapons work, there's

solar energy research,

micro machine research,

cyber security research,

those sorts of endeavors.

Nuclear weapons?

Nuclear weapons, yep.

It's part of the nuclear weapons complex

for stockpile stewardship along

with some of the other laboratories

just to ensure that the weapons

will function properly and...

as they age through the years.

So a wonderful target for cyber-attacks.

- It is.

- It can't get any better.

It's, uh, it has a big target on it, yes.

You stumbled over a problem?

A problem, yes.

Terrifying in scope, basically, you know,

hundreds of organizations...

military, defense, industrial based

compromised as far as their networks

and, you know, just...

people maintaining a

presence on the network

for the sole purpose of

siphoning off information of value.

But we know World Bank was affected,

NASA was affected, military was affected.

That's correct.

I just cannot talk about it. I'm sorry.

Alright, but...

we do know a name.

We do have a beautiful name: Titan Rain.

Mm hmm.

- Can you at least nod?

- Yes.

The scope of our conversation

was extremely reduced,

but some of the information here

became part of court proceedings.

The transcripts are public record,

including the name coined by the FBI.

You were not up at night in the office,

you were up at night at home?

Up at night at home, yes.

Lots of coffee?

Lots of coffee.

Lots of Nicorette.

And how rewarding is it to trail the enemy?

To find the track?

It's very rewarding.

It's like a puzzle,

finding patterns within chaos

that shouldn't be there

and finding these anomalies.

And once you scratch the surface,

you start to put together clues

and develop a better picture.

You can be certain that you're pursuing

a certain person or a certain entity

and it could just be a ghost.

Until you have some physical proof,

you have someone that kicks a door down

and sees that this is the person

that's actually behind the keyboard,

it can all be a myth or an illusion.

It could be, you know,

a layered sort of thing

or all at once, you know,

just to bring down power,

financial systems,

and just degrade, corrupt them.

Sometimes it's even worse, rather

than bringing it down you corrupt it

and undermine faith, let's say,

in the stock market.

Don't bring it down,

you start altering prices,

you start altering records,

and you delete them en masse

and just cause chaos

so the markets cannot even

restore and come up for days.

The possibilities of taking over spacecraft

and lowering the orbits of the spacecraft

so they burn up, and

vital GPS communications

and other sorts of communications are...

there's nothing there

to replace them anymore.

Could it be that we are

right now already in a cyber war

that we don't even notice?

Sure.

It doesn't matter how much money

a company invests in technology.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars

on your firewall, on your

intrusion prevention systems

and your spam, on your anti-virus,

and if I could just manipulate one person

inside that company, I'm in.

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