Advanced Persistent Threats - Part II. The China Angle

My earlier post about Advanced Persistent Threats just got more interesting. Today, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that China Telecom redirected up to 15% of all of internet traffic on April 8th, 2010. The attack targeted US Government Servers, Dell, IBM, Yahoo and Microsoft.

This means that Google is not alone, since they were viciously attacked in December 2009 (see previous post). In fact, what is interesting is that so far, the only company to stand up to the Chinese has been Google. How will these companies react?  Hard to tell since these kind of attacks are nearly impossible to stop, except that this attack was preventable.

So how did they do it? It was the result of changing the routing tables that are generated by network routers. As I have said in the past, the world is not a nice place and trusting all of the actors on the internet is no longer a smart business proposition. No enterprise and no government can really assume that they are not at risk from these types of attacks.

The net result of all of this is that a private, secure business network will emerge. Companies, such as the government owned China Telecom, if they keep perpetrating this kind of alleged behavior, will be blocked from conducting business outside of China.

The Apple iPad: The Game was over before it began.

In previous posts, I predicted that the iPad would be a huge hit. Many were skeptical in the press. Order taking just started last week (the unit hasn't shipped yet) and sources told the Wall Street Journal that hundreds of thousands of iPads have been ordered.

Where are all the orders for the look alike devices? The truth is Consumers are much smarter in 2010 than they were in May 1990, when Windows 3.x was announced. The iPad isn't even shipping yet and it has already won.

Of course, it isn't the iPad itself that is the difference. It really is the Operating System, the User interface and the applications and content that you can put on it that are the difference makers. Put simply, the iPad and it's brethren the iPhone/iTouch offer a superior user experience. They delight their users.

So the game is over before it has even begun. It will be interesting to watch which vendor makes a counter move, but they have mountains to climb and few have done their homework like Apple has on this product. Clearly, Steve Jobs and team have every right to be giddy with excitement.