Tony Blair's government hacked, book claims

AlbertPacino

Explorer
THE THRUST of this book is that while technology has made people's life easier, it's also given crooks untold opportunities to wreck peoples' lives, whether through spam, identity theft, viruses or old fashioned con tricks masquerading under new sheep's clothing.

A book, conventional wisdom has it, should grab you early and take you on until you reach the last page. And the authors of this book follow the precept faithfully. In the introduction they claim that "a full frontal attack" on 10 Downing Street left the Prime Minister of Britain reeling once the authorities had realised Whitehall was hacked from a mobile phone.

Details, add the authors, are "remarkably sparse", even though the government pulled in every expert under the sun to investigate. But then, they would be, wouldn't they? And who are these "experts", anyway? The authors tell you that.

Pete "Bunny" Warren is rightly famed within a large circle of British IT hacks for once observing that even though Monsieur Mange Tout had once consumed a whole aeroplane, it was only a small one.

Still, he writes a racy little story, our Bunny Warren does. And this is a good read that you can plough through without getting indigestion at all.

The authors don't say what systems Whitehall was running but it is public knowledge that Dell and Windows form a substantial part of the UK government's system. Apparently IT plumbers were found to have left fibre obtic cables sticking out of a hole in the road.

The book speeds on, covering the rise of the cyber crook, what the authorities are doing to challenge such attempts to milk the innocent of their cash, and profiles not only of the newly spawned Cyber Cop but of hackers as well.

Cyber zombies, bots that plumb the depth of networks, and many other topics are covered in this book, and the authors claim to have had exclusive access to the UK's freshly spawned National Hi Tech Crime Unit.

Honest cops can only generally plug a hole or close a stable door once the crook or the horse has bolted, but Streeter and Warren maintain this new breed of Cyber Cops are ahead of the game.

It's all a race against time, it seems, and so the authors propose a Cyber Manifesto at the very end of their work - followed by a list of references that include so many URLs that perhaps it would have been better if the publisher had produced it in PDF format, with links. And charged for it via a web site. URLs in books are really hard to click on.

But no-one pays for content on the Internet, do they? Except, presumably, readers of the Wall Street Journal online and the Straits Times. This is a good read, but a tad on the pricey side, we think.

Source

Personally i find it credible and by that i mean governments attend to cover "things" up like we all know.
 
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