On May 6, the media was full of warnings about an immediately pending cyberattack called “OpUSA.” Homeland Security said “The attacks will likely result in limited disruptions and mostly consistent of nuisance-level attacks against publicly accessible web pages and possibly data exploitation.” This seems a bit late in coming, as the OpUSA threat was made on the Web weeks ago. The threat statement online listed 140 banks as targets and rambled on about U.S. war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The government said that the attack would come from “Anonymous-linked hactivists in the Middle East and North Africa.”

This government action should strike one as comical. What kind of cyber defense is the announcement that there is going to be an attack that no one can keep from happening? Unless we had a mole among the attackers, we wouldn’t know what the technical means the attackers were using until after they attack. If we did have a mole, what would be the point of announcing the information publicly? The hackers would just change their modus operandi. I guess DHS has to show that it’s doing something.