How a cyberwar was spun by shoddy journalism

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/29/cyberwar-spun-shoddy-journalism

By Heather Brooke
guardian.co.uk
29 March 2013

A veteran Reuters reporter related a piece of advice given by his editor: "It's 
not just what you print that makes you an authoritative and trusted source for 
news, but what you don't print."

He wasn't talking about censorship, he was talking about what separates 
journalism from stenography and propaganda: sceptical scrutiny. The 
professionalism of the craft isn't simply learning to write or broadcast what 
other people tell you. Crucially it is the ability to delve, interrogate and 
challenge, and checking out stories you've discovered through your own 
curiosity, or robustly testing what other people tell you is true.

Scepticism was in short supply this week when breathless claims about the 
collapse of the internet were published in such reputable publications as the 
New York Times, the BBC and even technical journal Ars Technica, all falling 
prey to the hyped-up drama of a DDoS attack against Spamhaus, a group that 
tracks spammers, and their alleged attacker Cyberbunker, a Dutch hosting 
company Spamhaus had blacklisted.

Ars Technica described the attack as at "a scale that's threatening to clog up 
the internet's core infrastructure and make access to the rest of the internet 
slow or impossible". "If a Tier 1 provider fails, that risks breaking the 
entire internet," it continued.

[...]


______________________________________________
Attend #HITB2013AMS April 8th - 11th in Amsterdam.
Featuring over 42 international speakers and keynotes
by Bob Lord and Edward Schwartz http://conference.hitb.org