American Airlines Fiasco Could Lead to Other Attacks

      by Wyatt Walter

The Google/Sun-Sentinel/United Airlines fiasco earlier this week seems to just reiterate to me the one basic flaw of most Internet-based systems: computers trust other computers far too easily. Now, the person passing the story on to Bloomberg definitely had some issues with thoroughness, however I suspect most of that process is automated. The fact that the Google bot didn’t find a date on the page so it automatically assumed the news was new seems to point to a deeper flaw in the way we network our systems. Whether or not the problem was malicious or purely accidental, malicious attempts to cause damage like this are sure to follow. Using flaws in BGP that were disclosed at the recent DEFCON conference, an attack on an organization like this by editing news on major news sites. Obviously, the BGP issue is a much larger issue than this, but this definitely could add a new twist to the problem. With other recent security flaws surrounding another core networking service on the Internet, DNS, it makes me wonder how close we are to a much larger, coordinated attack like this. Perhaps the world won’t require a larger wake-up call than this before issues of trust are addressed, but not a lot has been said about the BGP issue since DEFCON on the mainstream media. Things looked positive as the DNS vendors all worked together to patch the latest DNS source port flaw. With real war being waged on the cyber front such as the Russian attacks on Georga over the web this year, these issues have to be of major concern to governments around the world.

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (0) : Sep 11th, 2008