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system’s functionality.”134 Hackers, they mean, reveal the dangerous holes of our new world. The bad news is that the worst of them (and often the best of them skill wise) did this at times by swiping your data, your money and finally your peace of mind. Their fortunes and safety and curiosity — all of these are woven together in their hot hunger to touch and pull and break the roots of the network. In a world of expanding connection, they are both more powerful and more dangerous than ever. 3. Networked systems of our age are confronted, constantly, with diverse, dangerous challenges, each informed by that Gordian paradox so familiar to us by now: The more connected we are, the greater the risks. And as bank balances, secret jet engine designs, and other priceless digital data are developed and then slipped safely away on connected machines, the rewards for cracking into the systems grow - far faster than the (near zero) costs of trying to break in. “It is increasingly obvious,” security researchers F.X. Lindner and Sandro Gaycken have said, “that the state of the art in Computer Network Defense is over a decade behind its counterpart in Computer Network Offense. Even intelligence and military organizations, considered to be the best positioned to defend their own infrastructures, struggle to keep the constant onslaught of attackers with varying motives, skills and resources at bay.”!35 The long list of failed US government security attempts express a strange digital logic: The more essential it is that an organization keep a secret, the less it seems able to do so. A decade behind? That is the gap between a flip phone and an iPhone. In the hyperspeed world of technology itis like confronting a laser weapon with a hoplite. The losing race slips easily enough into Donald Rumsfeld’s aheader-behinder dynamic, the one that haunts the paradoxes of national power we face now. Are we killing more terrorists than the madrassas are producing? Rumsfeld wondered. We can ask: Are we plugging more machines with more layers, software and applications than we can protect? Are we making more bugs than we're patching? (Yes and yes.) “Attackers are not like natural catastrophes,” Lindner and Gaycken write. “They can analyze their targets.” Bratus, a math genius who turned to computer science out of curiosity and now teaches at Dartmouth, has spent a fair amount of time trying to understand just what happens when a computer or a network is exploited by a hacker, or “pwned” in the funny idiom of Warez Dudes language. (The phrase means to take control, or to “own” a system. The spelling is an artifact of an overenthusiastic video-game death match gloat, in which one player killed another and in his rush to celebrate typed something along the lines of “I pwned you!” The mis-typing lives today: The highest award in hacking is known as The Pwnie.) Bratus calls the resulting, pwned device a 134 “Exploit engineers”:Sergei Bratus, et al. “Chapter 13: ‘Weird Machine’ Patterns” in C. Blackwell and H. Zhu (eds.), Cyberpatterns, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014, p. 13 135 Even intelligence: Felix “F.X” Lidner and Sandro Gaycken, “Back to Basics: Beyond Network Hygiene”, in Best Practices in Computer Network Defense: Incident Detection and Response, M.E. Hathaway (Ed.) IOS Press, 2014 98 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018330