Members of L0pht, including, from left, Tan, Kingpin, Weld Pond, Mudge and Brian Oblivion, rented a van for their trip to Washington for their Senate testimony in May 1998.
The hackers outside their hotel on the morning of their testimony: from left, Kingpin, Brian Oblivion, Weld Pond, Tan, Mudge (kneeling), Space Rogue and Stefan von Neumann.
The video embedded in this article shows the complete inability of government to address its primary function, to protect the citizens and the nation. That is the reason the federal government was created. These seven young men took time to travel to Washington DC to explain to politicians what they knew as fact. Typically politicians ignored these citizens and instead focused on seeking votes and campaign contributions. It is why so many people stopped wasting their time talking to politicians. They never listen.
What makes this even more obscene is the supreme genius in the White House with his degrees from Columbia and Harvard Universities, indicates his destructive goals by forcing a flawed health care system on the nation, that made delivery of health care worse. Using financial incentives it encourages medical providers to place medical records online. This facilitates obtaining not just personal identifiers for theft of money and identities, but also the medical vulnerabilities of all citizens. What a great idea to make all citizens vulnerable to harm, in the name of good.
[This is part three of three parts of report on internet security or lack thereof. Links to first two parts are embedded at the below link.]
[From article]
The seven young men sitting before some of Capitol Hill’s most powerful lawmakers weren’t graduate students or junior analysts from some think tank. No, Space Rogue, Kingpin, Mudge and the others were hackers who had come from the mysterious environs of cyberspace to deliver a terrifying warning to the world.
Your computers, they told the panel of senators in May 1998, are not safe — not the software, not the hardware, not the networks that link them together. The companies that build these things don’t care, the hackers continued, and they have no reason to care because failure costs them nothing. And the federal government has neither the skill nor the will to do anything about it.
“If you’re looking for computer security, then the Internet is not the place to be,” said Mudge, then 27 and looking like a biblical prophet with long brown hair flowing past his shoulders. The Internet itself, he added, could be taken down “by any of the seven individuals seated before you” with 30 minutes of well-choreographed keystrokes.
The senators — a bipartisan group including John Glenn, Joseph I. Lieberman and Fred D. Thompson — nodded gravely, making clear that they understood the gravity of the situation. “We’re going to have to do something about it,” Thompson said.
What happened instead was a tragedy of missed opportunity, and 17 years later the world is still paying the price in rampant insecurity.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/business/2015/06/22/net-of-insecurity-part-3/
NET OF INSECURITY
A disaster foretold — and ignored
LOpht’s warnings about the Internet drew notice but little action
Story by Craig Timberg
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