Good morning, John. Ever since Your Pants got hacked, I have been thinking a lot about the apocalypse. [music] Now you might think that there's a big difference between a bunch of script kiddies in Kamchatka bringing down Your Pants and the end of the world as we know it, but it turns out— some surprising similarities. But before we get into that... let me explain to you the anatomy of the attack on Your Pants. If you want any of the terms in the following description explained, just pause the video. There will be definitions on the screen. Let's start out, for those who are very confused right now, with "Your Pants." Okay, so first, a hacker discovered a vulnerability in the vBulletin software that runs Your Pants. That hacker then created an exploit for that vulnerability — at that point, a zero-day exploit — that he or she could use to exploit this vulnerability. The hacker released this exploit, probably in the form of a very simple script, that would allow anyone with even moderate computer knowledge the ability to hack Your Pants! These scripts were run by an army of underlings known as "script kiddies." The script would attempt to "own" the servers, pull off passwords that could be sold on the black market, use the servers for sending out spam, and stuff like that. Our white hat security expert, Sam Rudge, stopped the infiltration before any user data was compromised. So everything is safe, except the data that, uh, made up Your Pants. A big hunk of it, unfortunately, has been lost. So if you understood all of that without having to press "pause" and read definitions, then you're good. If you didn't, go back and watch it, read and understand all those definitions, because you're going to need to! Because we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift in the way that crime and war happens. So you're gonna need at least a basic knowledge of cyber-warfare and cyber-crime. Last night, for example, someone — or a group of someones — identifying themselves with the hacker group Anonymous totally hacked the Syrian Ministry of Defense website and put up, like, a message of solidarity for the people of Syria. This isn't really cyber-crime; this is more of a "hacktivist" thing. So, yeah, what Anonymous does is high-profile; yeah, it's kinda— like, sort of weirdly cool that they can do these things. But that's not what keeps me up at night, and let me tell you: This stuff does keep me up at night. The Russian mafia has a hacking team so sophisticated that it has revenues in the billions of dollars. They have collected so many credit cards that they can no longer sell them, because criminals are, like, "We have too many credit card numbers! I don't know what to do with these!" Chinese hackers, who may be sponsored by their own government, have been hacking governments and private corporations for years and have stolen billions of dollars of intellectual property. And what I find scariest of all is a piece of malware called Stuxnet. No computer virus has ever used more than one Windows zero-day exploit. Stuxnet had four. Stuxnet infected thousands of computers running industrial equipment all over the world, but it only activated in one place: The centrifuges refining uranium in Iran. While all of the readouts remained calm and everything looked completely normal, those centrifuges spun out of control and exploded! Who built Stuxnet? That's one of the things about cyber-warfare: No one knows where these things come from. Almost certainly, it was a multinational project spearheaded by the United States' government, but no one took credit for it. Another problem is that this is kind of like dropping a new kind of bomb on your enemy along with the plans for how your built the bomb. You don't wanna do this! Because now the code for Stuxnet is freely available on the Internet, and with the right knowledge, it could be modified to break down oil pipelines, shut down power plants, or open the floodgates of a dam. Now I am not generally an alarmist. I don't usually worry about these types of things, but this is pretty scary! So yes, I'm glad that Iran's nuclear weapons program has been set back significantly, but I don't know if it was worth creating an entirely new type of warfare to do it. Because I worry about the attacks themselves, but I also worry about the legislation that will be created to "protect us." One: Because the legislation will probably ruin a lot of what's great about the Internet, and two: Because the legislation will never be effective! There's no way that the professional arguers in Congress will ever be less than 42 steps behind the hackers. I wanted to talk about this because I want more people to know about it, but unfortunately, I don't have any, like, solutions. We've just gotta cross our fingers. Hackers are smart people— hopefully smart enough to know that destroying the world is a freakin' bad idea! John, I'll see you on Wednesday.