Blog Week 7 Chinese Hackers.

Here’s a blog related to technology, the future of education, the flat world and probably other less obvious things.




I was poking around SecurityFocus.com—(a pretty popular IT security website—like I usually do, wondering what ‘hackers, blackhats, Etc’ are up to around the world and came across as somewhat disheartening article about global internet security. The main thesis of the article was that it is now China that poses the greatest cyber-threat to global network security. The website sited a federal publication that was released by The Naval Network Command and stated that “attacks coming from China [are] the most significant for the United States’ military network defenders.” The purpose of these digital attacks from China have had a variety of different motives ranging from the theft of intellectual property to intelligence gathering and the creation of backdoors on U.S. military networks for later snooping. Currently the U.S. militarily holds the position that these attacks are government-driven. I found this interesting because during the Cold-War the U.S. spied on the soviet union and relied heavily on futuristic technology to do so (spyplanes, satellites, etc) and today we are seeing the fomentation of a new type of Cold-War that is being fought covertly on the internet. I think I already mentioned earlier in my previous blogs that the U.S. has planned to fight a global information war already and is prepared to be able to sever all communications on the planet—of course if this happened, so much for Friedman’s ‘flat world.’
On the education side, we have discussed and even demonstrated by using eportfolios on how new technology is being integrated into education, at all levels. If there is an information-war in the future where education is almost completely reliant on IT, then most of this nations learning facilities would more or less come to a halt, schools would have to call a virtual snow day. Also, since the hacking from China is also intended to steal intellectual property, American Universities conducting research will—or have already—fall victim to hackers who could steal research data and personal information on a daily basis. What disheartened me about this article is that new technology has allowed a Cold-War type of environment to take place that the general public doesn’t know anything about or assumes is years away and only a hypothetical possibility. I think that if the internet is going to have an expanded role in education and maintain the role it plays in defense, business, and technology, then there must be an effective method of policing the web.
Of course, to any negative there is only a positive, and that is this insecurity will mean that there will always be a demand for skilled IT professionals who specialize in network security, ‘untouchables’ if you will.