HUA HIN, Thailand - Chinese hackers, or hackers using Chinese Internet servers,
were blamed for data theft and breaking into the Pentagon's most ambitious
weapons program, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal this week
that cited unnamed former US officials.
The cyber-attack targeted top-secret plans for the long awaited F35 Joint
Strike Fighter, a US$300 billion warplane project. Several terabytes of data
related to the design and electronics systems of the fighter jet were
reportedly downloaded before the breach was detected.
China denied reports that hackers in the country had breached the US jet
fighter program two years ago, calling the allegations
made this week "irresponsible" and "made up".
The Pentagon and the lead defense contractor for the F35, Lockheed Martin, have
since stated that no critical data was accessed during the attack and that
their security systems are constantly monitoring attempted break-ins, which
happen with startling regularity. The information downloaded would not have
allowed hackers insight into the aircraft's software, radar or electronic
weapons systems and what was downloaded related to maintenance schedules and
self-diagnostics systems.
The F35 Lightning II is one of the most advanced air combat weapons on the
planet, it relies on 7.5 million lines of computer code, which is triple any
current air force fighter jet. If so much has been spent on developing the
ultimate attack weapon, then surely an equal amount should be spent on
cyber-security and protecting it.
The Barack Obama administration is on the case, as announcements this week
indicate that Washington is on the verge of creating a new cyber command to
coordinate the security of military defense computer networks. Cyber intrusions
targeting US networks are on the increase; more than $100 million has been
spent in the past six months responding to Internet attacks predominantly
originating in China and Russia. One such incursion even targeted and
compromised the US electric grid.
The plan will involve the restructuring of a number of US intelligence and
military agencies, including the National Security Agency, US Strategic Command
and the Defense Information Systems Agency. The Department of Homeland
Security, which governs non-military computer networks, will not be involved.
There is no doubt that cyber security is an ever-increasing problem to the US
government, so the creation of an entirely new military agency to monitor and
repel such intrusions may just be adding fuel to the fire. The battlefield of
the future is slowly being laid out, attacks will continue to increase in the
virtual world, and all sides will continue to develop greater and more advanced
defensive and offensive weaponry in their digital arsenals.
Internet
A Stockholm court has found the creators of the Bit Torrent search website The
Pirate Bay (See
Pirate holds law at bay, Asia Times Online, February 21, 2009) guilty
of assisting in making copyright content available. All four defendants were
sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to jointly pay $3.6 million in damages.
Lawyers for the defendants are preparing appeals to the verdict. Arguments are
that the site is more of a search engine for content, so in fairness the likes
of Google should also be prosecuted as people can use it to search for torrents
of copyright material. The process is likely to take time, during which the
Pirate Bay website will not be dropping anchor and will sail on as usual.
Search
Google has recently launched a couple of products that may change the way you
search for news or pictures. The image search can be a handy tool, but is
flawed - type in golf and you'll get images of pristine fairways and of
Volkswagens.
"Similar Images" appears as a link below the thumbnails returned by the search
engine, you can click this to reveal related pictures of what you were
originally searching for. This is a more effective way of narrowing down the
search and of giving users what they want quicker. There are other new filters
to the image search such as color, size or image type, such as animation or
news photograph.
Another new feature from Google Labs is Timeline, which orders information
chronologically from Google News. This innovative tool can be used to search
for anything from sports scores to global conflicts with a history of articles
all arranged by date, week, month or year.
Entertainment
Adobe Systems will be extending its Flash platform to home entertainment
devices including televisions and Blu-ray players by integrating the technology
directly into the hardware. This week's announcement stated that people will be
able to play high-definition videos and flash games through their
Internet-connected televisions and devices. According to Adobe, around 80% of
all online video runs on the Flash platform (FLV) as it enables high
compression whilst maintaining quality.
Hardware
The processor supremacy battlefield between arch rivals Intel and AMD was
relatively quiet in the first quarter amid all the doom and gloom of the
current economic climate. AMD, however, unleashed a fresh salvo this week with
updates to its product schedule aiming to deliver new high-performance models
of its Opteron chips for server systems. A six-core Opteron CPU code-named
Istanbul to be introduced in June will deliver a 30% performance increase over
current quad-core chips.
AMD plans to be rolling out by the beginning of 2010 new chips, code-named
Magny-Cours, which have 8- and 12-core technology, and the following year a
16-core data-crunching chip will be unleashed.
Intel has led the way for the past year or so with its quad-core Nehalem
processors and a six-core Xeon chip for high-end servers. AMD is now fighting
back, despite recent profit losses and subsequent declines in share price.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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