Getting through the GOOG's security is a really big deal.
And an example of what to expect should there be a war. Although it will be recognizable as combat the reality will be very different from what is portrayed in movies and on television.
When I mentioned www nodes being attacked, that is actually only the beginning. Because everything, in one way or another touches or is touched by the internet, from electric utilities to water and sewage to communications to gasoline pumps to credit cards and crypto and.....I hope you get the point.
Most urban areas are nine to twelve meals away from anarchy and the violence won't come from outside but from inside. A cold, dark, hungry Kyiv could be replicated wherever the internet goes and the downside would be a bit worse than not being able to stream Netflix.
And on a lighter note, hacking Google from Literary Hub, February 12, 2021:
Nicole Perlroth on the Secretive Global Cyberweapons Market
For several hours one early Monday afternoon in mid-December 2009, a Google intern teased apart the equivalent of a sonar blip on his screen.
Someone had tripped an alarm.
He sighed. “Probably another intern.”
Google had just introduced new tripwires across its network, and alarms were going off incessantly. The company’s security engineers were now spending all their time trying to decipher which blips marked an imminent attack, an engineer accessing a spammy poker site, or simply an intern stumbling down the wrong digital hallway. Almost always, it was the latter.
“There’s a Fog of War, but there’s also a Fog of Peace,” Eric Grosse, Google’s affable vice president of security engineering, told me. “There are so many signals triggering, it’s hard to know which ones to go after.”
Some inside the company likened it to Pearl Harbor. That Sunday morning in December 1941 on the Hawaiian island of Honolulu had started peacefully enough. Lieutenants were still familiarizing themselves with the naval base’s new radar system when a radar operator on the far end of the island informed the on-duty lieutenant of an unusually large blip on his radar screen—signs of a fast-approaching aircraft fleet over 100 miles away. The lieutenant’s first reaction was, “Don’t worry about it.” He assumed the blip was a squadron of B-17 bombers due in from San Francisco, not the first wave of Japanese bombers.
With so many new blips popping up on Google’s screens that December, it was simply human nature to prefer the simple, benevolent explanation—a disoriented intern—to the reality, an imminent nation-state attack.
“We weren’t trained to think about spies,” Heather Adkins, the freckled, thirtysomething director of Google’s information security team, would later recall. That Monday afternoon, Adkins was just wrapping up another Google meeting about China. The company had tiptoed into the Chinese market three years earlier and was still struggling to navigate Beijing’s draconian censorship rules.
Adkins was something of an anomaly among the mostly male, testosterone-fueled coders she managed. Most had a deep distaste for authority. They buried their heads in code by day and lived vicariously through virtual role-playing games by night. Adkins was more of a history buff, who spent her off hours reading up on the Middle Ages. She saw her security gig at Google as the digital equivalent of stopping medieval invaders in the ancient world. Her job was simple: “Hunt down evil.”
As her meeting came to a close, Adkins glanced at the clock. It was 4 pm. She might just be able to beat the rush-hour traffic if she left work early. But as she headed for the door, her intern beckoned, “Hey, Heather, check this out.”
The blip on his screen had metastasized and was now moving at dizzying speeds in and out of employees’ computers, across Google’s network. Whoever was on the other side of the screen was no intern. “It was the fastest cyberattack we had ever seen,” Adkins recalled. “Whoever they were, they were clearly practiced. This was not their first rodeo.”....
....MUCH MORE
