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Comment by ynniv | Hacker News Reader

What the hell is a "defensive" "cyberweapon"? Are we going to shoot down an incoming SSH session? Poison a compromised SSL session? Like screaming aircraft in space, these people have no idea what cyber warfare looks like.

How do they expect to defend against it?

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He admitted he is pushing a bill, and in all probability, there is a defense company that is selling some network monitoring, firewall-ing, or anti-virus software has probably asked for his "help" and is "sponsoring" both him and the bill

Good network monitoring, clever firewalls, that kind of thing. "Cyberweapon" is a bandwagon, of course, but there are devices and services that you can buy that do tend to make networks more secure, and having more of those is not a bad thing.

My employer sells a device that permits one-way connections only: http://www.fox-it.com/en/products/datadiode/. The "one-way" part is trivial, of course - the clever part is in making standard protocols work over such a link.

If you look closely at what they are proposing, the new bills and the new budgets almost always go into "offensive cyber capabilities" not defensive ones. So while they keep the fearmongering about cyber attacks, all they are doing is building better weapons to attack others themselves, and has nothing to do with protection, which also creates a loop where if the US does get attack because the networks are not protected, they get to demand for even more funding, and continue the cycle.

Exactly. This is a ploy to spend money building our offensive weapons. Pork for a campaign contributor, sharp sticks for the intelligence agencies.

I'd use honeypots. Or maybe write viruses designed to infect and nullify IRC sessions. Or write viruses which install software updates and patches.

Wait, no. I'd call tptacek.

How do they expect to defend against it?

I'd start with good design and engineering with due diligence, multiple redundancy, identification and delinking of potential failure points and well trained and equipped emergency response teams.

But they'll probably just hire lots of goons and get them to sit on facebook and stalk the insane.

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