Fergie's Tech Blog

IT infrastructures could be battlefields of future wars

Patience Wait (C'mon--Is that her real name? - ferg) writes in GCN.com:

A professor from Auburn University has made the case that the United States may face a war in the future in which not a single shot is fired, but yet America loses.

There could be “pre-emptive achievement of military objectives strictly by information warfare techniques,” said John “Drew” Hamilton, associate professor of engineering and director of the Information Assurance Laboratory at the university.

Hamilton projected that such a conflict could take place by 2015—the time it would take to infiltrate computer development programs and insert malware into operating systems, applications software, firmware and hardware.

Acquisition trends in the military actually facilitate the possibility of such a scenario, Hamilton added. “You don’t expect the military to go to Home Depot to buy a [rocket launcher], but we expect them to go to Staples to buy software,” he said.

posted by Fergie @ 8/17/2005 01:03:00 PM