Will the United States Fall to a Cyber Attack?

Let me start by saying that I am not happy about software development being off shored to India and other countries. Such off shoring has probably affected the income of software developers like me by 10s of thousands of dollars per year. But that’s the way the ball bounces. And maybe some of that money is in the hands of people that need it more than I do. I am still living comfortably so I don’t have anything to cry about.

On the other hand, it’s just plain stupid to have some types of software developed off shore because it is a threat to [United States] national security – and I am not saying that because my income has taken a hit -- its just plain true and I am wondering why no one is talking about it? It wouldn’t be hard to for an enemy of the United States to infiltrate a software development firm in India and insert some code that could be exploited in such a way as to cause significant damage. Actually I once accidently wrote a method that could be exploited to great harm. Luckily I was able to fix the mistake before someone had a chance to exploit it. But that means that an infiltrator doesn’t even have to write a single line of malicious code. All they have to do is look for a blunder by another software developer that can be exploited. Believe me there are plenty of those. I once spent 3 months making mindless changes to Microsoft Windows software swapping out exploitable functions calls with ones that couldn’t be exploited.

So given this information – why are banks like Washington Mutual off shoring the software development? That is scary. Al-Qaeda’s strategy is to bankrupt the United States. So far they seem to be doing a pretty good job and they haven’t even killed very many of us. They don’t deserve all the credit though because they are getting tons of assistance from George Bush. But then why should they get even more help from a pack a greedy CEO’s that are willing to jeopardize national security for the sake of more profit?

NO FORTUNE 500 COMPANY SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO OFFSHORE SOFTWARE EXPOSED TO THE INTERNET.