ISIS Blogs

I’m sure most of you have read the article in BusinessWeek that turned up on Slashdot regarding the hacker attacks the US government has to deal with. If you haven’t, you really should read it because despite its obvious inaccuracies (journalists always get something horribly wrong) it’s got a ton of good information. I liked how they explained exactly how the unknown attacker uses phishing (whaling?) so effectively.

But really, my alterior motive for posting this, was so I could point out this one particularly entertaining paragraph buried in the middle of it:

Now, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller (D-W. Va.) is said to be discreetly informing fellow senators of the Byzantine operation, in part to win their support for needed appropriations, many of which are part of classified “black” budgets kept off official government books. Rockefeller declined to comment. In January a Senate Intelligence Committee staffer urged his boss, Missouri Republican Christopher “Kit” Bond, the committee’s vice-chairman, to supplement closed-door testimony and classified documents with a viewing of the movie Die Hard 4 on a flight the senator made to New Zealand. In the film, cyber terrorists breach FBI networks, purloin financial data, and bring car traffic to a halt in Washington. Hollywood, says Bond, doesn’t exaggerate as much as people might think. “I can’t discuss classified matters,” he cautions. “But the movie illustrates the potential impact of a cyber conflict. Except for a few things, let me just tell you: It’s credible.”

For the record:

“Except for a few things, let me just tell you: It’s credible.”
- Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-MO) on Die Hard 4