He has a background as civil engineer and geoscientist. He has worked mainly within the oil and gas industry from the mid 1980s. He has written a few fictional novels as well as being the author of some professional litterature within oil and gas sector, he is now an editor of some web sites.
The infection of this so-called Trojan Conficker.B worm has been spreading with dramatic speed all over the globe and infected public, private and commercial systems more seriously than first believed.<br><br>
The French military is struggling with this problem and is a contributing cause to the grounding of the Dassault Rafale fighters on January 15th and 16th this year.<br><br>
The fighters were not assaulted directly by the worm, but support systems were heavily infected and restrictive security measures were initiated to stop the spreading of this infection on their computer systems. <br><br>
Some of the systems that the fighters needs was targeted and the fighters had to take into operation alternative systems for downloading of flight data.<br><br>
The first infection in the military systems was detected on January 12th this year according to the newspaper Libération. The problem was described in a letter leaked to the security internet site called Intelligence Online. <br><br>
On of the methods the ordinary user can use in order to stop the flow of data worms is to continuously update the operating system on the computer. One update came in September 2008 that closes the window of opportunity for this worm to spread through. A more effective update from Microsoft has been launched that makes it even more difficult for the worm to spread itself on a system.<br><br>
This case, once again set the question of secure computer systems used in critical public and commercial operations around the world.
If the worm and virus builders can put fighters on the ground because they can infect military systems, then one has to ask oneself, how close are we from the real cyber war?<br><br>
How secure can we make a system and still be able to use it? A paradox any computer security person has to ask himself every day. We know as long as a system is designed to have human interaction with it, it is prone to attacks through these interaction points in the software. Any input or output through a computer system is prone to attacks and software requires input and output on their system in order to interact with humans.<br><br>
We have all seen Hollywood make movies with plots where entry of computer systems makes global effect, making life miserable for individuals, companies or even countries. The intellect and resources within the criminal organizations recruiting technologists enables them to create forceful weapons to attack computer systems on vital community systems as well as commercial and national security systems all over the world. <br><br>
As been discussed in the community long time, is the use of the poverty in Eastern Europe to recruit state of the art intellects within computer science to criminal organizations to create systems from economic scams to illegal computer system entry software. <br><br>
We therefore need to ask ourselves, what responsibility and measures the society has to ensure that intellect is used in legal areas, and not illegal ones. We might fuel a cyber attack with ramifications not believed possible if nothing is done soon. We might have seen some pre cursors now, and the latest one is the grounding of the fighters aircrafts of the French military.
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