The Dangers of Allowing an Adversary Access to a Network (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
03/14/2013 – Cyber Security
Schoolchildren learn the tale of the Trojan Horse, the giant gift in which Odysseus and a platoon of 30 Greek soldiers hid to gain access to the heavily defended city.
Thousands of years later, it remains a thoroughly modern concept that is increasingly found at the heart of cyberwarfare strategies. Modern Trojan horses are computer code or vulnerabilities hidden in software or hardware that would allow a spy or an attacker to gain access to an adversary’s computers and networks. Find a way to be invited into the computers of your enemy’s weapons and military systems and you can render them useless in the face of an attack.
For more than a decade, Pentagon officials have been anxious about the growing reliance by the United States electronics industry on Chinese manufacturers. As the Internet has become the nation’s critical infrastructure weaving together commerce and power systems and even military command and control, it has become increasingly unthinkable to have a foreign presence in the network. Their fear is that those building and maintaining the network could build in a Trojan horse.
(Continue reading at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
My Two Cents: This is a very informative article on Modern Trojan horses! Spy systems are very bad, and my fear is even when you purchase a new firewall or any other network device, it has already been compromised before it was placed in the box and shipped to you!
