At a conference of chief technology officers in 2016, General Michael Hayden, former head of, at different times, both the NSA and the CIA, told the audience, “Cyberwar isn’t exactly war, but it’s not not-war, either.”
Cyberattacks, at the nation-state level, were already almost a decade old at that point. In 2007, over the course of 22 days a Russian attack on Estonia took out commercial and government servers, online banking, and the Domain Name System,” without which people can’t find or look up websites and online servers. The attack carried into the cyber realm an already heated political conflict between the two nations, and Estonia’s economy was as much under attack as its information infrastructure.
In 2010, we learned of the U.S.–Israeli attack on Iran and its uranium centrifuges, known as Stuxnet.
In 2015, a concerted attack, believed to have been Russian, on the power grid of another east European nation, Ukraine, left more than 200,000 people without electricity for at least several hours. It was the first attack on a grid, and perhaps the first large-scale SCADA attack—that is, on the control systems of critical infrastructure. Follow-up attacks struck the railway, television, and mining sectors.
In 2016, right around the time General Hayden was warning American audiences of the dangers of cyberwar, Russia, in conjunction with a private firm, Cambridge Analytica, and elements of the U.S. Republican party, crafted a disinformation campaign to influence the presidential election that year. Russia and Cambridge Analytica also undermined the Brexit referendum in the U.K. earlier that year.
Since then, we’ve seen entire families of malware appear, such as Trickbot. Arguably even worse was the recent SolarWinds hack, which in effect was an attack on what we might call the software supply chain. As many as 18 000 different organizations using SolarWinds may have been affected. Worse, the effects of the hack may have been reached out into other networks and therefore been exponential. For example, both Microsoft and security firm FireEye were affected, and they each have many enterprise customers.
As the fourth-century Roman poet Juvenal asked, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who shall guard the guardians themselves?
A @RadioSpectrum1 conversation with Justin Cappos who heads the Secure Systems Laboratory at @NYU. On @Spotify and @IEEESpectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/multimedia/podcasts
In this March roundup, IEEE Spectrum's editor-in-chief Harry Goldstein and senior editor Stephen Cass talk about some of the highlights of Spectrum's recent coverage, including a plea for programmers to stop producing bloated programs, a new transistor that could help make how we handle electrical power smarter, and the potential return of optical discs as a high-density date storage medium.
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently released the open-source ARES_OS, a key software component of their Autonomous Research System. ARES_OS allows relatively simple robots to perform experiments, and develop new experiments based on the results. The AFRL's Benji Maruyama talks with IEEE Spectrum associate editor Dina Genkina about how he hopes the system becomes not just an invaluable helper for grad students, but opens up research to many more people outside traditional labs and enables progress in tackling hard problems like climate change.
The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a major expansion driven by the seemingly insatiable demands of AI, the addition of more intelligence in transportation, and national security concerns, among many other things. What this expansion might mean for chip-making's carbon footprint? Can we make everything in our world smarter without worsening climate change? Lizzie Boakes is a lifecycle analyst at IMEC, the Belgium-based nanotech research organisation, and she speaks with senior editor Samuel K. Moore about her work on this problem.
We've all seen impressive demos of prototype brain implants being used by paralyzed patients to interface with computers, but none of those implants have entered general clinical use. Biomedical device company Synchron is close to actually coming to market with its stentrode technology, promising less spectacular results than some of its competitors, but making up for that with ease of use and implant longevity. Synchron's co-founder Tom Oxley talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Eliza Strickland about the new tech, and you can read more in our January issue article by Emily Waltz.
The EU Sustronics program aims to make creating, maintaining, and recycling electronics more sustainable. Liisa Hakola is a senior scientist and project manager at the VTT Technical Research Center in Finland. She talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about VTT's role in the EU's program, helping manufacturers to develop flexible, printed—and even compostable—electronics.
Security researchers Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan believe it's time to stop trusting our data to the cloud, where it can be exposed by greed, accident, or crime. In the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, they proposed a plan for "data decoupling" that would protect our data without sacrificing ease of use, and in this episode Raghavan talks through the highlights of the plan with Spectrum editor Stephen Cass.
Co-CEO's of Silmach, Pierre-Francois Louvigne and Jean-Baptiste Carnet, talk about their new MEMS technology with IEEE Spectrum editor Glenn Zorpette. The tech has been used to create the first major upgrade to the movement of quartz watches in decades, a power efficient motor that is 50 percent smaller, allows fluid forward-and-back motion of the hand, and requires so little power a watch can run for over a decade before it needs a new battery. Louvigne talk about their new hybrid watch, which combine smartwatch electronics with analog faces, and partnerships with manufacturers such as Timex.
Alan Clark of SUSE talks with IEEE Spectrum editor Stephen Cass about the disruption in the enterprise Linux community caused by recent announcements by Red Hat over open source access to its codebase, and the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Alliance (Open ELA) by SUSE, Oracle and CIQ in response.
Justine Bateman is an author and filmmaker. She also holds a degree in computer science from UCLA and is the AI advisor to SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union currently striking against movie and television studios. In this episode, Bateman talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about actors' demands for control and compensation over digital avatars created in their likeness, and the destructive potential of generative AI in Hollywood.
Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, and author of the just released book, We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age. An excerpt from the book regarding the emerging prospect of digitally reanimating the departed is available on IEEE Spectrum's website. In this episode of Fixing The Future, Wong talks with senior editor Eliza Strickland about how the increasing datification of our lives could make this prospect possible—with or without our consent.
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