Ask HN: As this is the first major large scale cyber-war, thoughts? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As this is the first major large scale cyber-war, thoughts?

18 pointssamstave12 comments

I was just realizing how much the planet is going to learn how a large scale cyber-war involving not just nation states, but corporations and socially organized random citizen able to participate in this Asymmetrical Attack Vector warfare...

Anonymous announced suppoedly, that they are declaring "war" on Russia and started attacking Russian Gov sites...

The NSA is going to leanr a SHITLOAD from these events.

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If by “cyber-war,” you mean coordinated invasion then sure, but without more information I’m going to disagree.

It’d be incredibly impressive if the US and it’s Western allies were to use a combination of sanctions and massive offensive cyber warfare capabilities to bring Russia to heel.

Anonymous is a joke within the sec community.

Perhaps a way for the US to make unattributable attacks tho.

/g/ morons at their best. DDoSing russian websites to what end?

Nobody gives a damn about a website. The military doesn't use HTTP.

What a useless publicity stunt.

What harm came of it, though? Sounds awfully pretentious to just bash on nerds having some fun.

> username is smoldesu

> nerds having fun

...escalating an invasion which now leads to more civilian casualties because of it

> fun

Please, go eff yourself where the ffun doesn't shine.

> ...escalating an invasion which now leads to more civilian casualties because of it

Do you have anything that would suggest Russia has retaliated against Ukrainian citizens for an attack they didn't carry out, or is that just conjecture? I fail to see how a disruption of Russian infrastructure by a completely unaffiliated party would somehow lead to them being more capable of attacking Ukrainians, especially when their own government has explicitly asked help on this front[0].

Your comment is borderline incomprehensible, and also violates the site guidelines. You've already garnered a bit of a reputation online, and being so overtly confrontational doesn't do much to clear your image around here.

[0] https://news.yahoo.com/ukraines-government-asks-hackers-help...

> Your comment is borderline incomprehensible, and also violates the site guidelines. You've already garnered a bit of a reputation online, and being so overtly confrontational doesn't do much to clear your image around here.

Context for dang and others: this user is a 4chan troll trying to get me to talk about what they did to me last year, so I'm just gonna ignore this one.

If you are curious about Russia and Ukraine, read the media. It's literally everywhere.

This is neither the place nor the time to discuss hate cultures like 4chan/8chan/kiwifarms/pol/ etc. People like to believe conspiracy theories in the name of freedom because they're more exciting than the boring reality. They just try to blend out the collateral damage they're causing while doing their "fun" activities. And justifying it because of some sense of moral code (that is actually anarchistic in nature, and not democratic) is borderline insane, so I'm not gonna comment more on this one.

Just go on your merry way, I stopped caring about trolls like you :) Have a nice day!

If defending vigilante hackers targeting Russia makes me a "4chan troll" then I had better start looking for a bridge to live under. I asked you a question, and twice now you have refused to engage with me on good faith and devolved to personal attacks.

You're welcome to ignore the personal politics of this conversation (or the conversation altogether), but if you're not going to stay on-topic then you probably shouldn't waste your time replying in the first place.

The resources that nation states have are going to always trump what private corporations and socially organized random citizens. Anonymous is not going to be able to pull off hacks against industrial control systems. Those are the hacks that are going to make differences. Things like the Ukraine power grid hack [0] from 2015 or the hack of a dam in suburbs of New York [1] are the cyber attacks that are going to make a difference in times like these and those don't happen without a lot of planning and resources. Defacing government websites or even DDOSing those same sites is not going to make a big difference (or potentially make any difference).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukraine_power_grid_hack

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/iranian-hackers-claim-c...

I am sure there will be some defacing, but that is the digital version of painting Hitler mustaces on posters.

Unless we see a Stuxnet attack on something important - say the Russian gas pipeline, causing significant physical damage - I doubt it would matter.

>>Unless we see a Stuxnet attack on something important - say the Russian gas pipeline, causing significant physical damage

These are the things I am worried about - and what will be really interesting and terrifying aspects. Everything else is chaff

I certainly hope somebody does - I don't have the skills to pull that of, but it would be the highlight of my week.

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