Wired Science at PBS

Yesterday on October 3rd from 8.00pm to 9.00pm PBS hosted Wired Science show, it was fantastic and the topics covered were about science experiments, a surgeon doing surgery with the aid of robots, technology that let’s a person read other people’s ( like an autistic person’s ) thoughts and how Russian hackers crippled the country of Estonia.

My favorite section of the show was about the Cyberwar that was waged on the tiny country of Estonia which apparently is the most wired country in Europe which paralyzed the functioning of websites of government, news organizations and major banks. The hackers used botnets which are networks of surreptitiously commandeered “zombie computers” to bombard a target website with requests for information, overwhelming the host computer and forcing the site down. Read about it here.

Forget about terrorist attacks and actual physical warfare with people getting killed and properties destroyed, this Cyberwarfare could be the latest way to bring down a country and cripple the functionality without physically entering the country. I visualize these “botnets” and compare them to stealth war planes or remotely programmed missile attacks that physically target and attack a country causing massive destruction and carnage, except that in Cyberwar it is all remotely done to cripple the country’s functioning and economy. The show also talked about how unprepared the US was if something like this happened in the US and the effect of it.