C14JohnGillooly 

Consensus IT Writers Awards

Has the whole world gone insane? John Gillooly assumes the answer is 'yes', and throws his hat into the ring.

The two simple words 'Terrorists Win' are ones that anyone who has played CounterStrike will recognise. Unfortunately they will not be what people see in the CPL World Championships, which are due to be held in Dallas in December. The change of nomenclature from Terrorist to Attacker and CounterTerrorist to Defender is one that survived a rather large backlash from the gaming community.

It all started with an announcement that Valve Software would be creating a special edition of CS for the tournament. This was to have changed team names to clan names, locked down the models used by each team, changed generic team references to Attacker or Defender and swapped the bomb used in diffusion maps with a much more politically correct communications device.

Common sense prevailed and the bomb was reinstated after much bitching on the CPL forums, but these generic references still remain. There is logic to this; the World Championships event is seen as a big chance to push competitive gaming into the common consciousness. However, when considering recent events how successful could a game featuring terrorism actually be?

That said, there has been a lot of strange reaction to the war against terrorism, from the understandable delays of games like Rogue Spear: Black Thorn (I wonder what was the problem with the mission they removed?) to the CPL events and something that has me frankly disgusted.

In the immediate aftermath of the events of September 11, there was a jump in the amount of 'Hacktivism', with hackers heading straight for Websites like the Taliban's United Nations delegation site. This sort of activity is not new, after China captured the US spy plane earlier this year, an almost full blown defacement war started.

This is pretty much a small subsection of the online, and even hacker, community. The vast majority of hackers and script kiddies keep away from this sort of action. That does not stop hacking being potentially used as a tool of terrorism, but the chance of that is pretty small. 
The scariest parallels drawn so far between hacking and terrorism have been shocking -s but not in the way that you would normally expect. An article by the Gulf Coast .NET evangelist, Michael Lane Thomas, discussed the recent Gartner Group report that recommended business move away from Microsoft's Internet Information Server, largely due to the huge security problems that plague the package. Fair enough, but the analogies used were disgusting. The basic thrust of the article was that people who examine and exploit security holes in IIS are no better than the terrorists who examined and exploited security holes in America's air transport system in the lead up to September 11.

Strangely enough, the point-counterpoint article in question lasted only a few weeks and has since disappeared from both the originating Website, www.devx.com (which was replaced with a 'content has been removed' page), and even Google's cache (no conspiracy theory about Google though, sorry).

That blanket statement, which actually encompasses all of the world's Internet security experts is both reactionary and just plain untrue. Microsoft has recently been pushing a new Strategic Technology Protection Program (STTP), which is designed to make people more aware of the need for security patches and the like. Unfortunately the biggest impact so far has been a statement that experts should not keep on informing people of bug exploits within Microsoft code.

The two statements and the sudden use of the term 'cyber terrorists' when referring to hackers is frankly a knee jerk reaction to a situation that is not a public safety one, but an issue of profit. If the security situation is so bad that reports are emerging telling people to just stop using the software, then Microsoft has a lot to lose. If you want to take a government security angle, I am prepared to wager that no security sensitive American systems actually use Microsoft software - that's why we have UNIX.

These diametrically opposite reactions to current events are worrying, and definitely indicate that we are in for crazy times as we see what is deemed publicly palatable in the wake of the events. Let's just hope that some sort of sensible middle ground can be found.

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