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Please. "Hell online" is going to be trivial compared to the thousands who will die in the first hours of the conventional artillery shelling of Seoul. Let's no

Please. "Hell online" is going to be trivial compared to the thousands who will die in the first hours of the conventional artillery shelling of Seoul. Let's not pretend that some leaked emails are in any way going to be as bad as that. And frankly, hacking into Sony is not that hard to do.

cmurf 9y ago
The casualties will, and should, stun people. The Korean War, 1950-1953, total civilians killed/wounded: 2.5 million (wikipedia), and cost $341 billion in 2011 dollars (Congressional Research Service). And then there will be a massive refugee problem on both sides.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- thehardsphere 9y ago
  And since then, South Korea's population has gone up. There are something like 20 million people living in the Seoul greater metropolitan area. A future war here might make every war we've had in the sandbox lately look like a summer barbecue.
  - astrodust 9y ago
    So long as the planet of the population keeps going up and the population density of cities increases the chance of multiple millions of people being killed in a single military exchange keeps escalating. I'd like to think we can keep a lid on things and work it out in a more civil manner, economically it makes more sense, but you know, dictators don't really care about economics as much as they do ego.
flukus 9y ago
Last week Maersk was shutdown worldwide for 24 hours, how long do you think major cities can keep going without that cargo coming in? How long can the keep going if the water or electricity supply was compromised? As terrible as a shooting war in Korea would be, it's still a lot better than a potential full scale cyber war.
- Animats 9y ago
  Maersk still isn't fully up, 9 days later. See my previous post.
astrodust 9y ago
I honestly don't know what's worse. Shelling Seoul, which will be bad don't get me wrong, or killing the power grid and water systems of entire countries. The latter could utterly cripple logistical systems and lead to a total melt-down of society if there was enough panic brewing. If there's shelling you can evacuate the city, you can head out of range of the guns. There's nowhere to hide from electronic warfare if your entire society depends on power, fuel and computers. This isn't about leaked emails or advance copies of movies, it's about attacking and permanently damaging large portions of infrastructure. If you can fiddle with a power plant you can destroy generators, transformers, and other extremely expensive equipment that could months to source, fabricate, transport and replace under ideal conditions. They don't have a warehouse full of spare turbines just sitting around. Stuxnet showed what can happen if you pin-point target a particular system. If you broaden the scope of your targets, if you don't care about collateral damage, the stakes are very, very high. Hacking into Sony wasn't hard and I have a sneaking suspicion that most infrastructure control systems are as bad or worse. The black-out in eastern North America in 2003 shows how suddenly things can change if the grid goes down. That only lasted a day and yet the economic destruction was significant. Imagine if not only were the power plants offline, but they were crippled in such a way they couldn't come back without serious repairs. That is a possibility here. Months without power, without water.
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  New York famously lost their power grid in 1977. And then it came back online. I'm still not convinced cyber-war will lead to the coming of The Rapture.
  - lovich 9y ago
    Didn't that single event have far reaching effects on American and worldwide culture? In this case it ended up being positive in my opinion(helping develop hip hop and rap through stolen DJ equipment[1]), but there's no guarantee that a similar event would also be positive. That is especially the case if an actor is trying to cause as many problems as possible. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977...
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Agreed. Maybe I'm ignorant but the cyber-war doomsayers sound to me a bit like the Y2K doomsayers. Now, when cars/trucks become fully self-driving ... now you have a scary scenario ripe for hackploitation.
- astrodust 9y ago
  People worked their asses off to avoid Y2K, everything needed to be tested, patched, and tested again. Unfortunately we have not been as vigilant about security. We're barely able to handle script kiddies armed with a bot army of webcams. We're completely unprepared for when a nation-state actor declares electronic war. You're right that as we get more and more automation going on our exposure surface grows dramatically.

cmurf 9y ago

The casualties will, and should, stun people. The Korean War, 1950-1953, total civilians killed/wounded: 2.5 million (wikipedia), and cost $341 billion in 2011 dollars (Congressional Research Service). And then there will be a massive refugee problem on both sides.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
thehardsphere 9y ago
And since then, South Korea's population has gone up. There are something like 20 million people living in the Seoul greater metropolitan area. A future war here might make every war we've had in the sandbox lately look like a summer barbecue.
- astrodust 9y ago
  So long as the planet of the population keeps going up and the population density of cities increases the chance of multiple millions of people being killed in a single military exchange keeps escalating. I'd like to think we can keep a lid on things and work it out in a more civil manner, economically it makes more sense, but you know, dictators don't really care about economics as much as they do ego.

flukus 9y ago

Last week Maersk was shutdown worldwide for 24 hours, how long do you think major cities can keep going without that cargo coming in? How long can the keep going if the water or electricity supply was compromised? As terrible as a shooting war in Korea would be, it's still a lot better than a potential full scale cyber war.

Animats 9y ago
Maersk still isn't fully up, 9 days later. See my previous post.

astrodust 9y ago

I honestly don't know what's worse. Shelling Seoul, which will be bad don't get me wrong, or killing the power grid and water systems of entire countries. The latter could utterly cripple logistical systems and lead to a total melt-down of society if there was enough panic brewing. If there's shelling you can evacuate the city, you can head out of range of the guns. There's nowhere to hide from electronic warfare if your entire society depends on power, fuel and computers. This isn't about leaked emails or advance copies of movies, it's about attacking and permanently damaging large portions of infrastructure. If you can fiddle with a power plant you can destroy generators, transformers, and other extremely expensive equipment that could months to source, fabricate, transport and replace under ideal conditions. They don't have a warehouse full of spare turbines just sitting around. Stuxnet showed what can happen if you pin-point target a particular system. If you broaden the scope of your targets, if you don't care about collateral damage, the stakes are very, very high. Hacking into Sony wasn't hard and I have a sneaking suspicion that most infrastructure control systems are as bad or worse. The black-out in eastern North America in 2003 shows how suddenly things can change if the grid goes down. That only lasted a day and yet the economic destruction was significant. Imagine if not only were the power plants offline, but they were crippled in such a way they couldn't come back without serious repairs. That is a possibility here. Months without power, without water.

JKCalhoun 9y ago
New York famously lost their power grid in 1977. And then it came back online. I'm still not convinced cyber-war will lead to the coming of The Rapture.
- lovich 9y ago
  Didn't that single event have far reaching effects on American and worldwide culture? In this case it ended up being positive in my opinion(helping develop hip hop and rap through stolen DJ equipment[1]), but there's no guarantee that a similar event would also be positive. That is especially the case if an actor is trying to cause as many problems as possible. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977#Effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977...

JKCalhoun 9y ago

Agreed. Maybe I'm ignorant but the cyber-war doomsayers sound to me a bit like the Y2K doomsayers. Now, when cars/trucks become fully self-driving ... now you have a scary scenario ripe for hackploitation.

astrodust 9y ago
People worked their asses off to avoid Y2K, everything needed to be tested, patched, and tested again. Unfortunately we have not been as vigilant about security. We're barely able to handle script kiddies armed with a bot army of webcams. We're completely unprepared for when a nation-state actor declares electronic war. You're right that as we get more and more automation going on our exposure surface grows dramatically.