Internet News

by Mike Sterling

November 12, 2011

To Comment on this article Click Here

In the Internet age we've all heard of Malware, that pesky thing that seems to be an invention of a new brand of criminals -- The Cyber Thugs.

We'll it's now bothering the big guys, banks and governments. What can be done?

The thugs are getting more and more clever and everyone is worried.  Yes, yes, we've heard that before.

What you might not have heard is that it cannot be stopped!  Can the experts find all the Malware?  No!  Can they recognize it all the time?  No!   These are general statements of course, but the experts in the industry of computer security know we cannot catch them all and they may be hidden for years, just waiting.

You mean to say that Norton and McAffee and all these protections we believe in can't find everything?  That's right!  How about the MAC?  As vulnerable as anybody.

What makes things worse is that chips can be infected too in very strange ways.  On November 9th, 2011, the US Senate held a hearing on the importation of chips from China that were in fact used and sent back to the far east as junk to recover metals only to be sent back to us in electronic gadgets.  Part of our E-junk that we carefully set aside at the landfill can come back to us in other products and these products can contain infections and virus elements.

They can do things like turn off electrical power, open dykes and produce airplane failures. So, you  see that the virus scans of Norton-like products won't do much for things buried in chips that are either replacements or new, but out of control of those that look for trouble.

The only way to stop the E-junk issues is to screen the vendors and do random checks on what's coming in to Canada, the US and the Common Market.  We think about our troops at risk, but not from E-junk.

You think this is farfetched?  We'll I've had personal experience with E-junk a long time ago.  I worked on a game for the Las Vegas gambling market.  In order to register coins for play we had two micro switches that registered a valid play.  We put them in tandem so crooks could not fish the dollar tokens in and out and get free plays.

One clever crook bought up a huge supply of these switches (chip based) and installed a tiny sensor on them.  Then he sold them back into the replacement switch market in Las Vegas.  He would troll around casino after casino until he found one of his rigged switches and then play for free. 

How was he caught?  He was arrested on the Casino floor for over $10,000 in back parking tickets and his scam was uncovered by accident.  Pretty clever eh?

^{for world news, books, sports, movies ...}

Sunday, November 13, 2011