There are four cyber-security stories that have cropped up recently to which everyone should be paying close attention:
This past week, DMV offices all over California had their computer systems shut down by what was apparently a hardware failure. There’s evidently no reason to suspect the DMV’s systems were attacked, but the incident shows off the frailty of government computer systems, the ease with which the whole edifice can collapse when a single brick is smashed (accidentally or intentionally).
The week before, websites all over the country were shut down when a major American Domain Name System host was attacked. DNS hosts handle the conversion of web addresses that make sense to men — say, NationalReview.com — into the universal system of numerical addresses that make sense to computers. Without the conversion of one to the other, the name you type into your browser’s address bar won’t connect you to that website’s servers; your internet provider won’t understand what you’re looking for. Unless you know your destination website’s IP address (National Review’s is, for instance, 104.16.126.47) and unless it allows direct IP access (National Review does not) the website becomes inaccessible.
That is exactly what happened to large swaths of the Internet two weeks ago, when Dyn, one of the U.S.’s major DNS hosts, was flooded by a tidal wave of artificial internet traffic. It tried to convert addresses for so many fake browsing requests that it was unable to respond to the real ones, like a bartender getting 10,000 orders for Banana Daiquiris just before you try to order a beer. With their DNS host overwhelmed, sites such as Twitter, CNN, Paypal, Reddit, Spotify, and Netflix stopped working.
One week before that, WikiLeaks began publishing John Podesta’s e-mails, and the Clinton campaign decided that it would try to redirect the story toward Russia, which they say is responsible for stealing Podesta’s email. That might not be true; it’s certainly possible that it is — various intelligence agencies seem to think so. There is no doubt that Russia would like to tamper with our elections, or, short of that, to appear to be tampering with them. Because the Obama administration has a more or less established policy of non-response to cyber-attacks — from Russia, from China, from North Korea, from Iran — the Kremlin no doubt felt comfortable giving it a try.