Don't believe the cyberwar hype

One problem caused by the rise of the world wide web and 24 hour news is that news items are now often generated with very little fact checking or journalistic analysis.

A fairly good example of this is a story about an alleged Chinese web traffic hijack.  There's a lot of suppositions in this story, and when faced with such notions it's a good idea to apply occam's razor.  Is it more likely that:


(a) Chinese technicians made a configuration error, then corrected it 18 minutes later.

or

(b) The Chinese government conspired to hijack a vast amount of internet data, in order to perform unspecified data mining or tampering on it.

In the absence of any other information, I know which hypothesis makes the fewest assumptions.

There's also some fearmongering in the article about the Stuxnet virus.  The appearance of viruses which are specifically targeted at industrial infrastructure, as opposed to the usual constituency of hapless internet users, is cause for concern.  However, it's important to note that even though considerable expertise, time and probably financial resources may have been required in order to create Stuxnet, and that there does seem to be credible information suggesting that it was targeted at a specific location (it only affects inverter drives whose manufacturers are based in Finland and Iran), as far as we can tell it was completely and utterly unsuccessful at causing any non-trivial amount of industrial disruption.  This should indicate something to us about the difficulty and likelihood of any nation being able to launch a cyberwar capable of causing significant inconveniences to an opponent in a targeted way which doesn't simply degrade the whole internet globally.  The introduction if IPv6 should make malware writers (whether they're state sponsored or not) jobs even harder, since the address range becomes so incredibly gigantic that brute force attacks really have enormous odds stacked against their success.