Trump Inherits a Secret Cyberwar Against North Korean Missiles

[bathroommonkey76]

Source: The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Three years ago, President Barack Obama ordered Pentagon officials to step up their cyber and electronic strikes against North Korea’s missile program in hopes of sabotaging test launches in their opening seconds.

Soon a large number of the North’s military rockets began to explode, veer off course, disintegrate in midair and plunge into the sea. Advocates of such efforts say they believe that targeted attacks have given American antimissile defenses a new edge and delayed by several years the day when North Korea will be able to threaten American cities with nuclear weapons launched atop intercontinental ballistic missiles.

But other experts have grown increasingly skeptical of the new approach, arguing that manufacturing errors, disgruntled insiders and sheer incompetence can also send missiles awry. Over the past eight months, they note, the North has managed to successfully launch three medium-range rockets. And Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, now claims his country is in “the final stage in preparations” for the inaugural test of his intercontinental missiles — perhaps a bluff, perhaps not.

An examination of the Pentagon’s disruption effort, based on interviews with officials of the Obama and Trump administrations as well as a review of extensive but obscure public records, found that the United States still does not have the ability to effectively counter the North Korean nuclear and missile programs. Those threats are far more resilient than many experts thought, The New York Times’s reporting found, and pose such a danger that Mr. Obama, as he left office, warned President Trump that they would likely be the most urgent problem he would confront.

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/04/world/asia/north-korea-missile-program-sabotage.html

[secondwind]

1. Looks like Dumbo decided to go with deporting illegals as a priority... n/t

[Cosmocat]

2. VERY fascinating documentary on Showtime about Stuxnet

This was the about how we worked with Britain and Israel to develop a virus that helped to temporarily stymie Iran's nuclear programs.

A few out takes.

It worked, but then Israel went rogue and pushed it too far and exposed it.
There is a LOT of "ethical" or "legal" aspects of this that need to be worked out over time.

Very well done documentary.

Really helps to get a grip on what is going on now.

[bathroommonkey76]

4. Thanks for posting

I thought I had seen all of Alex Gibney's documentaries- I'll be watching this one later today.

[paleotn]

5. A whole new realm of conflict.

Wonderful documentary. Stuxnet is obsolete now, but imagine what's taken it's place in our arsenal. The most serious threat isn't necessarily attacks on infrastructure itself, but rapid, blind escalation. The main threat is the difficulty in pinpointing the source of an attack in real time and the level of deniability they provide. That could very, very easily lead to an extraordinarily messy military conflict, dragging in those who may not have had anything to do with a cyber attack. In that respect, they're damn near as dangerous as nuclear weapons. But like nukes, we dare not fall behind our foreign adversaries in defensive and offensive cyber capabilities. Sucks, but that's the world we live in.

[Roy Rolling]

3. He is studying cyber to know what it means

[They_Live]

6. I believe that it's called

"the cyber".