Cybersecurity Guru Bruce Schneier, author of ‘Data & Goliath’, a New York Times bestseller, discussed the Internet’s resiliency and China’s suspected cyberattacks against major US companies.
NOTE: The day following this interview an attack occurred against Dyn, a domain name service provider, that disrupted access to high profile sites such as Twitter, Spotify and the New York Times. Attackers took over tens of millions of devices using malicious software called Mirai.
Bruce Schneier, aged 53 years, is an American cryptographer, computer security, privacy specialist, and author. Having written several books on general security topics, computer security and cryptography his latest book, ‘Data & Goliath’ is not only a best seller but a MUST read!
Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute. He has been working for IBM since they acquired Resilient Systems where Schneier was CTO. He is also a contributing writer for The Guardian news organization.
Editor – I read some of your comments recently about the DDOS attacks and there were questions around the testing and resilience of the Internet. So I’m seeking your thoughts on who may have been testing the Internet and its vulnerability?
Bruce – It was the first story that I have written that has a lot of unsubstantiated rumours and I was told these things by some companies and I wrote about them because nobody else had. These were about a particular style of DDOS attack against large infrastructure companies, that look like someone very much testing the defensive capabilities of these companies.
Now I can’t name the companies, but there was this Verisign report on DDOS which confirmed that what they were experiencing had mirrored exactly what I was told. (Verisign Distributed Denial of Service Trends Report LINK)…Click HERE to read full Q&A.
