If you haven’t already, please read Seymour Hersh’s insightful and non-alarmist New Yorker article on cyber security in the context of the recent Stuxnet virus and China’s growing hack capabilities.
The Hersh piece contains a very simple solution to safeguard our nation’s IT against government or mere freelance hackers: mandatory encryption of all commercial and civil Internet communications.
While this broad approach is attractive in principle, cost and inconvenience make this less than desirable. And there’s also opposition from the same government intelligence agencies responsible for protecting us against cyber attacks in the first place: they wouldn’t be able to eavesdrop as easily.
Though perhaps not the most credible candidate, Microsoft has offered its own proposal, an idea that has proved useful in managing infectious diseases: PC health certificates.Continue reading