Future wars = Cyber says Kaspersky

http://rt.com/news/kaspersky-cyber-it-military

 

if only future military conflicts would just be cyber ones.

 

Heh,

A consumer-based nation that imports nearly 100% of all its technology components is in a weak and precarious situation. This is true right now July, 2011 and the dependency on foreign technology manufacturing is near 100% for some countries.

Back in 2010 there were 4 extra MSR debug registers discovered in some AMD chips that required a specific value to be present in other registers to become unlocked. Of course... the registers were not completely secret... there were vague references to them on some older AMD documentation.

Of course when it hit the media it was blown out of proportion... there was no foul play. But the interesting aspect here... is that this hidden capability present in millions of CPUs all over the world remained publicly undocumented for so long. Only perhaps a few dozen engineers in the world knew about them and they had to sign a NDA to get that documentation.

It just may be possible to introduce an obfuscated payload directly into the video card processor/chipset OR cpu/chipset and have it remain undiscovered for decades. The skill level required to reverse engineer 45 – 65 nanometer silicon wafers created via photolithography is so high... out of the seven billion people on the planet... perhaps 0.000001% have the skills to even begin the reverse engineering process. Out of that 7,000 perhaps only a few dozen would be able to identify an obfuscated payload. And because thse guys are doing more important things they probably aren't even looking.

Of course... an operation like this would require a fabrication facility and deep pockets.

-MessageBoxA

 

Pretty interview. That ქართული ვარდი is pleasant to the eyes.

A lot thrown together though as performing 'cyber attacks'; cyber-criminals, hacktivists and 'government black ops cyber operators' aren't exactly the same.
Also, 'cyber warfare' seems often used (Not necessarily in this interview but in general) where there is only cyber-espionage.
The mentioned Stuxnet is a sample of warfare though imo.