February 21, 2012, 4:05 PM —
There is a big, big difference between "could" and "will."
Gen. Keith Alexander, the commander of the National Security Administration should learn that if he's going to go around making accusations and warning top U.S. officials about cybersecurity risks, according to members of one cybersecurity risk.
This morning the Wall Street Journal reported Alexander had been making the rounds of Washington– the White House, Congress – to warn leaders and federal agencies that Anonymous may attack and take down parts of the U.S. power grid when it finishes developing the capability, in about two years.
Alexander apparently spread this warning despite no evidence it was true and no evidence from Anonymous that it would be interested in doing anything vaguely like it.
According to the WSJ, the piece of data that made NSA analysts believe Anonymous had suddently become dangerous to the infrastructure of the country (rather than the reputation of specific companies) was the rumor Anonymi would take down the Internet March 31 in an operation known as GlobalBlackout.
It doesn't take an army of behavioral analysts, technical experts and massive electronic eavesdropping systems to figure out that's probably an empty threat. OpGlobalBlackout isn't even a good analog of true.
I did it a week ago and I have hardly any omniscient global eavesdropping capability at all.
