Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Like the poster?

Sorry about that little blip of downtime earlier today; there was a software problem so I took advantage of the interjection to install all the latest security patches — what are they, daily?

Anyway, I'm not sure how many people saw this, but it's looking like the Blaster worm was one of the causes of the powerblackout up here and across the northeast US (more) — not so much in that it caused it, but that it made it cascade. The grid is of course a real-time system, and the Blaster worm hugely degraded latency across the netwrok causing the control systems communications links to malfunction. In addition, the havoc it played on email made it difficult to bring the system back up again afterwards.

Hannibal over at ArsTechnica (more) points out something obvious that you don't see discussed much,

What's amazing to me is that none of the major viruses has yet had a payload that's designed to wreak serious havoc, like formatting hard drives, subtly altering numbers in Excel spreadsheets, or otherwise messing with people's data in a way that might really mess up major industries. But of course, it's only a matter of time.

He's right of course… Oh, it's giving me Fight Club visions. You know at the end when all the banking buildings come tumbling down? Now, in real life, that's not going to work, but there are other ways…

As Hannibal points out, all it would take is a very minor tweak of these viruses and worms (which have incredibly deep penetration — a huge percentage of commercial systems are infected) and they can edit accounting documents. If you trash a system (ie. format the drive), then backups will be used… But slowly tweaking and editing spreadsheets would eventually cause trillions of dollars worth of damage, damage that would be nearly impossible to recover from, and that, done right, would literally bring the Western economy to its knees.

And it's not that hard to do…