The #FBI warning to U.S. state election boards to beware of hackers has all the makings of a spy-fi thriller. https://www.wired.com/2016/08/hack-brief-fbi-warns-election-sites-got-hacked-eyes-russia/

The #Russians weren’t named in the FBI note, but lots of fingers are pointing to them. Top folks in cybersecurity cite a series of hacks that culled embarrassing information from the Democratic National Committee and the #Clinton campaign.  Intelligence officials, who weren’t named, pinned the attack on Russia, with one of the officials attributing the work to Russian intelligence agencies.

Remember that ‘what-another-goofy-moment-by-Trump’ comment where he encouraged Russian President Vladimir #Putin to dig up more dirt on Clinton. Some Clinton supporters suggested the mouth that roared’s encouragement of the enemy might be considered  treason.  The legal minds across the U.S. whirred on overtime and concluded #Donald_Trump’s_mouth may betray him but, so far, not the country.

What’s got everyone coiled tighter than a swiss movement is the potential for hacking the U.S. Presidential Election.

Remember when the outcome of the 2000 U.S. presidential election was left hanging by its chads pending a recount? Lots of Florida votes used Votomatic punch card ballots. If holes weren’t completely punched through, you got a ‘hanging chad’ with a corner or two still attached, or a ‘fat chad’ with corners intact, but dented. In either case, the votes weren’t counted.

The controversy ended the use  of punch card ballots in the United States.

Instead of machines messing up a small percentage of votes, this time around we have the prospect of a not-so-friendly foreign power intentionally manipulating democracy by falsifying election results. The repercussions, a large proportion of the population refusing to accept the result and resulting widespread civil unrest, could be more damaging to America than having its defense system hacked.

The Cold War’s long gone. Welcome to the Cyber Wars .

North Korea hacked computers at Sony Corp.’s Hollywood studio to retaliate against a film spoofing the country’s president Kim Jong Un.  President Barack Obama’s administration vowed to retaliate against North Korea proportionately.

When North Korea’s internet went down a few days later the White House would not admit to being behind it but issued no clear denial.

Off-the-record, U.S. cyber officials said the U.S. was behind the internet blackout in North Korea and Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, cited the outage as reprisal for disrupting computers at Sony.

Cyber espionage has been a game played by business and government for decades.

The Canadian Department of National Defence delayed its decision to transform the former Nortel R&D complex in Ottawa into its version of Pentagon North because it discovered a series  of listening devices at the facility.

For a time, Nortel was the most valuable company in Canada comprising more than a third of the Toronto Stock Exchange’s 300 Index and three times the value of all Canadians bans combined. Its spectacular fall casting 94,000 from their jobs was in part attributed to unrelenting hacks.

Nortel had been the target of industrial espionage for almost a decade. An internal security study by Nortel suggested that the hackers had been able to download research and development studies and business plans starting in 2000. The hackers also placed spyware so deep into some employee computers it escaped detection.

 

 

 

The true cause of the calamity, according to people closer to the event, was a Russian engineer who kept increasing pressure to maintain the flow of natural gas when the equipment reported a leak.  A massive gas cloud built until a passing Russian train sent a spark that ignited the gas.

As history has shown us, the smarter and more technologically brilliant the human race becomes, the more we find ourselves at the mercy of our own stupidity.