Stupidity: A Real Cyberthreat.

Thu Jan 19 23:00:00 UTC 2006

First of all: the IRA carried out very successful "systems attacks" on
the City of London, and also on major transport systems - motorway
viaducts, railway stations and signalling centers, airport terminals -
both in kinetic (real, actual bombs) and nonkinetic (hoax calls)
modes. All of these were practically speaking pre-Internet.

All right, this is NANOG. Yes, some of you were chatting over the
thing about who you wanted to fuck at Berkeley in 1973. For
economically and practically real-existing purposes in the UK, 1996
was pre-Internet. I'm sorry, I'm not in the master race.

The IRA 1990s London offensive was intended specifically to inflict
economic costs and political disruption without serious casualties, as
the IRA was in negotiations with government at the time. After John
Major kicked over the negotiations in order that the DUP would keep
his government in power, they wanted to put a fire to his balls
without appearing uncivilised enough to cause a hate-wave among the
public. Hence the sysdisrupts.

One thing they did not do was attack telecommunication targets. I
still have no idea why. In the UK they are normally quite obvious.

Beware..