Looking at the past ten days of attacks, which covers the terrible incidents in Mumbai and afterwards, we see no such evidence of attacks, both in DDoS traffic alerts and in DDoS commands in botnets. Only a handful of attacks have reached India in this time, most against consumer lines and none against government sites. No similar attacks have been detected in Pakistan in this timeframe.
This casts a further shadow over the clumsy work by the attackers with GPS, satellite phone and cell phones. It seems clear that the attackers represented a fairly low-tech, although highly trained, threat cell.
People commonly assume attacks must have some kind of special method, or sinister device, rather than just a different approach to common every-day practices. Bruce Schneier has put some comments previously made on his site into his post for today, emphasizing this point.
The State of Hawaii and the Hawaiian Electric Company on Tuesday endorsed an effort to build an alternative transportation system based on electric vehicles with swappable batteries and an “intelligent” battery recharging network.
[…]
“We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model,” [Shai Agassi] said in a telephone interview. “The typical driving plan is low and leisurely, and people are smiling.”
Cute. San Francisco and other Bay Area cities already have endorsed the same electric car network, perhaps with even more smiles.
I spoke with a representative from an electric company recently, as I was working on NERC Cyber Security, and he bemoaned the fact that electric cars are starting to burnout the electric grid. A Tesla roadster, for example, pulls at 240V and a few in a neighborhood could be a major problem for the infrastructure. This reminded me of a house I owned in 1996 where we tried to install a T1 and were told by the phone company that they would have to pull a new line from four states away to provide the bandwidth.
The BBC says a man in France has documented how a drug can suppress the urge to drink:
Dr Olivier Ameisen, 55, one of France’s top heart specialists, says he overcame his own addiction to alcohol by self-administering doses of a muscle-relaxant called baclofen.
He has now written a book about his experience – Le Dernier Verre (The Last Glass) – in which he calls for clinical trials to test his theory that baclofen suppresses the craving for drink.
I can’t help but notice a phrase offered by Dr. Pascal Garche in Geneva, as quoted by the BBC: “the book is going to set the cat among the pigeons”. Nice marketing.
Cat! who hast pass’d thy grand climacteric,
How many mice and rats hast in thy days
Destroy’d? How many tit bits stolen? Gaze
With those bright languid segments green, and prick
Those velvet ears – but pr’ythee do not stick
Thy latent talons in me – and upraise
Thy gentle mew – and tell me all thy frays,
Of fish and mice, and rats and tender chick.
Nay, look not down, nor lick thy dainty wrists –
For all thy wheezy asthma – and for all
Thy tail’s tip is nick’d off – and though the fists
Of many a maid have given thee many a maul,
Still is that fur as soft, as when the lists
In youth thou enter’dest on glass bottled wall.