A.P. Lawrence

2005/06/23 TrojanGate (Are we really this dumb?)

MSNBC is reporting cyber-attacks of Israel and the U.K. by presumed Islamic terrorists and says that the U.S. government pays little attention to this sort of thing. Hmmm.. where have we heard that before? Wasn't that most of the frustration Cliff Stoll complained about in The Cuckoo's Egg ? Yes, it was. Moreover, the article goes on to say:

Virus writers are now authoring programs designed specifically to
look for documents flagged as confidential or "critical." They've
also built software that can quickly index information on spy-software
attacked computers -  a sort of Google for economic espionage to make
sorting through mountains of stolen data easy.

That's nothing new, either. Really, this reminds me of George Santayana's "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Are we really this naive, this dumb?

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