SPACE: THE NEW CYBER CRIME FRONTIER
It sounds like the imaginings of science fiction writers. However cyber experts warned yesterday that hackers could send the world back to the 1960s by hijacking satellites dotted around space, creating havoc below. The Bible states about human crimes or sins that reaches up to space using cyber technology :
♉”And prayed: I am much too ashamed to face you, LORD God. Our sins and our guilt have swept over us like a flood that reaches up to the heavens. — ( Ezra 9:6)
Her sins been heaped as high as heaven:
♉”For her sins have been heaped as high as heaven, and God has remembered her iniquities.— ( Revelation 18:5)
Our overwhelming reliance on space technology makes us acutely vulnerable were it to ever break down or be deliberately sabotaged. For those gathered at the conference on national security and space at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) yesterday it was an issue they felt needed to be confronted more openly. “It is a real issue and a real vulnerability,” explained Mark Roberts, a former space and cyber expert at the Ministry of Defence who has recently moved to the private sector. “What we are doing is making ourselves more vulnerable to attack than we had been formerly. My personal view is that a day without space is not going – as some people say – to send us back to the dark ages. It’s more likely to put us back into the 1960s.”
♉In Psalms 73:9 “They have set their mouth in the heavens. Their tongue walks through the earth.- ”
Every day, miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, an army of satellites provides us with a vital stream of information. From our mobile phones to satnavs, from shipping channels to television broadcasts, from the monitoring of our melting polar ice caps to the running of vital defence systems – our world would struggle to function without the satellites above us. Cyber experts from across Britain gathered in London yesterday to ponder what would happen if we were forced to deal with a “day without space”. The threats against our satellites are as varied as they are numerous. From solar storms that temporarily knock out communication, to mid-stratosphere crashes and deliberate attack, satellites are frighteningly vulnerable. One of the issues causing the most concerns – that has somewhat belatedly sparked attempts to initiate a clean-up – is the sheer amount of litter surrounding Earth. Nasa estimates that there are as many as 16,000 pieces of debris larger than 10cm orbiting within 2,000km of earth – the region where most of the world’s satellites are positioned. Each piece can travel at tens of thousands of kilometres an hour, and could easily destroy any satellite it meets. It’s also getting crowded up there. Since the space race began in the late 1950s, more than 6,500 satellites have been sent up, of which only 994 are still operational. As Professor Richard Crowther, from the UK Space Agency put it: “Space is infinite, but the space around the earth is finite.” Three years ago the world was given a frightening glimpse into what will happen unless we reduce the number of redundant satellites in space when a working telecommunications satellite built by the US firm Iridium was struck by a defunct Russian Kosmos satellite. The computer models predicted the satellites would pass with half a kilometre of each other. Instead the collision, which took place at 26,000 miles per hour, created more 1,000 extra pieces of debris larger than 10cm – which are still causing problems to this day. Given the carnage that can be unleashed by a collision, the array of redundant satellites provides an opportunity for malignant hackers looking to cause mayhem for strategic or anarchic reasons. Mark Roberts, who pioneered the introduction of cyber elements into the war games that the MoD runs, hypothesised a scenario in which hackers take control of one or multiple redundant satellites and use them to crash into more vital ones. “There are lots of satellites in orbit at the moment that have been taken off line,” he explained. “They still have propulsion, they have the ability to be restarted. Somebody particularly nasty could hack one of these things and then start to manoeuvre it.” cybercrime include hacking, online scams and fraud, identity theft, attacks on computer systems and illegal or prohibited online content. The effect of cybercrime can be extremely upsetting for victims, and not necessarily just for financial reasons.
THE SCIENCE OF THE BIBLE 