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The Economist ran an article recently on the concept of the 'logic bomb'.
If you don't know what a logic bomb is, then it can best be described by saying that it is an engineered malfunction in a piece of software intended to cause damage and inflict corporate (or indeed personal) harm.
The story goes like this… the Russians stole some software from Canada to manage a Soviet gas pipeline back in 1982. The CIA had tampered with the system prior to its theft to ensure malfunction and to cut a long story short.
According to
the memoirs of Thomas Reed, a former air force secretary, the result was spotted by an American early-warning satellite when it detected a large blast in Siberia in June of that year.
Reed recounts that the stolen software had gone haywire resetting speeds and valve settings to produce pressures far beyond those acceptable to pipeline joints and welds.
He described the result as "the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space".
So if a logic bomb could be primed to find its way into the Soviet oil and gas infrastructure nigh on 20 years ago, what's stopping the cybercriminals from crashing the national electricity grid of the average American state or medium sized European nation? Could cyber terrorists wreak wide scale havoc and really shut us down?
These new soldiers of fortune, or as we commonly call them today "cyber criminals" are getting stronger every day. Their destructive potential is great enough for President Barack Obama to define cyberspace as the fifth domain after land, sea, air and space. But are we really on the brink of cyberwar or is this just scaremongering?
The reality of cyberwar is probably overstated much as the next nuclear war is not likely to happen by the middle of next week. This is because the Internet and those companies (and I will purposely include AVG here) that build the defensive layers that keep the World Wide Web alive are intelligent – and by intelligent I don't mean clever. We are intuitive, we are self-evolving and we are all pervading, more so than any virus.
Yes malware is exploding exponentially, but at a granular level if we break down instances of malware balanced with the muscle of the research labs that underpin the security layer protection that
AVG offers, we will always tip the balance in our favor.
