Rise of the Cybergens

By Dr. Lansing Gordon

Rise of the Cybergens is about a new generation of 100% digitally gifted young people aged 13 to twenty-something who are replacing the Millennials as the emerging, global power demographic. They are highly prone to terrorist radicalization. A battle wages, not just among the U.S., China, and Russia, and a vicious arms race at the edge of the digital abyss, but between ISIS and the West, and the hearts and minds of the youthful Cybergen cohort. Will they become ‘cyber-warriors’ for God and Country, or will they be seduced by terrorist propaganda, from within the Internet wilderness? Cybergens are born to hacking as the ‘new normal’. They seek refuge in the Darknet, where no one can find them. Their presence, across this country, go from the Boston Marathon to San Bernardino, CA. It is a trail of death.
The book is based on the idea that Reagan’s Nuclear Cold War is replaced by a Cyber Cold War, being played out by the Cybergen’s manipulation of the Internet. Many of the strategies imposed by President Reagan can be applied to today’s crisis. The author’s first book on the subject, ‘Cybercentrism and the New Cybergens’, was focused on the changes inherent in emerging demographic models, and the evolution from Geocentrism to Cybercentrism. Dr. Gordon’s new book focuses on the young Cybergens, as they emerge into today’s Cyber Cold War environment, where the Internet is the new battlefield.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Dec 7, 2015
• ISBN: 9781682228340

Book preview

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by

Dr. Lansing Alexander Gordon, DBA

Author of Cybercentrism and the New Cybergens 2nd Ed © 2007

See: Cybercentrism-New-CyberGens-Second-Edition

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ISIS reportedly controls 90,000 Twitter accounts in addition to thousands of other social media profiles, many built and maintained by tech-smart Cybergens. (See Chapter 4.) Cybergens, by definition, are 100% digitally literate from birth. They are the new, young minds, aged, today, from 13 to early twenties, who are most easily radicalized to home grown terror. They take naturally to the devices and technology of high-tech encryption that keep Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Bok Haram, and ISIS hackers and propagandists online. Cybergens are the great Internet-trotters of the Deep Web and Darknet, sanctuaries far below the Internet’s Surface Net where they are invisible and impervious to enemy threats. (See Chapter 9.) The Internet has advanced the efficiency of terrorists and offered expansive reach of their ideologies. Young, computer-savvy Cybergens can go online and demonstrate how to build explosives, or even how to craft a rudimentary jamming device that can wreak havoc with airport control towers.

In the U.S., Islamic extremist propaganda is targeted towards the Cybergens. They are the youngest, most defenseless, most socially alienated, and most impressionable target. ISIS chat rooms, online games, videos, and anti-American rhetoric will result in more cyberattacks on the Internet, and attacks on America’s homeland. The Cybergen brain trust is a highly valuable asset to America. We must learn how to inspire and lead them, before they are lost to the enemy.

The listing of over 175 designated terrorist groups can be found at:

(httpss://en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​List_of_designated_terrorist-groups) The State Department has an extensive listing of terrorist groups at (http://www.state/j/ct/​ris/other/des/123085.htm)

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COPYRIGHT

Under copyright laws, the contents of the book may not be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted, or distributed in any way, in whole or in part, without the prior written consent of the author/publisher.

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DISCLAIMER

This is a work of nonfiction, with fictional attributes regarding future projections and predictions. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products from present or past history, with accompanying source references, or are of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. The author has made every effort to portray persons, quotations, institutions and historical data accurately, but does not assume, and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by misquotes, inaccuracies, errors, or omissions.

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ISBN #

978-1-6822283-4-0

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CHAPTERS

CHAPTER ONE

CYBERGENS: THE SEEDS OF ANARCHY

CHAPTER TWO

CYBERGEN FLASHPOINTS:

THREATS TO INTERNET SUSTAINABILITY, & MORALITY

CHAPTER THREE

CYBERGEN MOTIVE JOURNEY: A DIGITAL BRAIN TRUST

‘PERSONA’ IN ISOLATION.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CYBER COLD WAR: TERRORISM & PROPAGANDA

CHAPTER FIVE

CYBERGEN ATTACKS ON BUSINESS SYSTEMS

CHAPTER SIX

THE CYBERGEN GENESIS:

THE DAY AFTER THEY STOLE THE INTERNET.

CHAPTER SEVEN

BRINKMANSHIP: ELECTRONIC WARFARE / ALPHA TO BRAVO

CHAPTER EIGHT

REAGAN, SAUDI ARABIA’S KING FAHD, AND

A REDISCOVERY OF TRUE LEADERSHIP

CHAPTER NINE

THE DEEP WEB, THE DARKNET, AND THE NEXT PRESIDENT.

CHAPTER TEN

THE ‘HACKMAILER’ THREAT.

M.I.C.E. MOTIVATIONS FOR CYBERGEN SPYING.

CHAPTER ELEVIN

THE POST-HACKING ERA. HOT SPOTS TO COLD SPOTS.

CYBERGENS ADOPT OBCET

CHAPTER TWELVE

CYBERGEN CONSCRIPTS,

MERCINARIES, & HOLY HACKTAVISTS

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CYBERGENS WILL WAGE CYBER-WORLD WAR:

THREE DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CYBER WAR DÉTENTE & THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

DEFEATING THE CYBERCALIPHATE:

THE CYBERGEN PRIVATEERS

ANNEX

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CYBERGEN ADVANCED ONBOARD TECHNOLOGY:

ADOPTION & CONSEQUENCES

BONUS: FIRST TWO CHAPTERS ‘RISE OF THE QUANTUMGENS’

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GRATITUDE TO

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Learning Center, for making priceless, historical documents available to the public.

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OVERVIEW

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With the arrival of a new generation that is 100% digitally pure from birth, came the talent to hack their parents’ smartphone by the time they were eight. They were working the walkthroughs, cheating at video games, by the time they were ten. They believed that connecting and interacting online was nothing short of a given human right. Theirs was a fortuitous gift from Mother Nature’s potpourri of earth, sky, air, water and Internet. They were seen by their older Millennial peers as ‘Google babies’, never separated from everything digital. Older Millennials were still cable watchers, groundliners, Apple-ogglers, and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs worshipers. They were living the last days of the Internet’s Golden Era. Youthful Cybergens couldn’t know that their arrival, as the latest generation, was soon to become a digital train wreck. Cybergens were born at the brink of the digital abyss. They stood naked and defenseless against the Internet’s ensuing Dark Ages. Elder Millennials still bathed in the fading light of self-disillusionment, standing in line for the very latest, shockingly expensive smartphone bobble, assured that their social status depended upon its possession. The Millennials’ ignorance and denial of the approaching storm clouds was perpetuated by marketers, tracking them by their online social media footprint like human cattle, with the promise of more addictive bling-like games and alluring apps. Media moguls knew what ‘users’ were going to buy before they did. Millennial gullibility would prove to be a last, domestic digital dance at the edge of oblivion.

Early U.S. Cybergens, born to highly digital households, many in their teens, caught the haunting voice of someone called Snowden, and heard stories of the ugly underside of the paradise-like, social/cell communications platform. They were 9/11 babies. Snowden revealed the NSA spyware invasions of their privacy, Verizon’s data dump into government servers of every communication since forever, and Silicon Valley’s permissive betrayal of their privacy…all evidence of a once pristine Internet-based world crumbling around them. Cybergens heard about the stealth-like theft of their beloved Internet by Federal Communications Commission bureaucrats. Their high school and college graduations were being infiltrated by Homeland Security agents, looking for youthful hackers, not to arrest, but to hire for a Cyber Army. Even Cybergen smartphones became reminders of an ill wind. The profane profit margins from smart phone and tablet sales rode on the Benzoate-soaked fingers and poisoned lungs of Sino-underclass wage slaves working in filthy factories, hidden from public view by the Computer Industrial Complex (CIC).

Millennials had grown to adulthood. Now came their younger siblings, envious, angry, and bitter that they had arrived at the crumbling edge of the Internet’s Golden Era, in time to watch it begin to fall apart. NSA spying, however necessary in a dangerous world, was feared. Snowden revelations to include Silicon Valley brand name treachery, and the theft of the Internet by Washington’s FCC were all signs that the Cybergens were born at the cusp of the digital abyss. Nothing but pain was left for the youthful Cybergens, as they witnessed the despoliation of the computer world mystique. Worse still was their full dependency upon the super-digital lifestyle that was being denigrated.

While the worship of the Internet united Millennials with younger Cybergens, it was the CIC realities that divided them. Youthful Cybergen minds could not compute what Millennial mores accepted in a numbed allegiance to Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Samsung, Verizon, IBM, Sony, and other purveyors of civilized e-space. For Cybergens, their leap, from the warm womb of childhood animated digital friends and giddy online games, into a cold, uncivilized, hackable e-space, with boorish war games that emerged from the ashes of their 9/11 memories like shock therapy, came with the territory. This younger, little brother cohort was naturally critical of an older generational sibling, who demanded that they take up the pace behind them.

And there was a war brewing. All around Cybergens were the signs of a Cyber-Cold War. It was timed perfectly with the arrival of a cyber-generation destined to fight that war. The vicious electromagnetic skirmishes and monster jamming attacks in the virtual battlefield, effecting satellites, land forces, and vessels at sea, were becoming more frequent, as were global hacking attacks. Cyber-skirmishes led to breaches in security so severe as to constitute acts of war. U.S. containment, of what could be seen as Chinese aggression in Asia, prompted General Martin Dempsey, Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff to say, The US military will be obliged to overtly confront China as it faced down the Soviet Union. The comparisons to Reagan Era Cold War and a new, Cyber Cold War are not without value. The brink-of-war parallels are just as intense. (http://www.atimes.com/atimes/​World/WOR-01-230713.html)

Cybergens couldn’t know that these cyber-skirmishers were the engine of an arms race, within an accelerating Cyber-Cold War, that would plunge their future world into conflict. Chinese, ISIS, and Russian opponents sparred with the U.S., perpetuating the idea that a Cyber-War was winnable. It was nothing short of Cyber muscle-flexing amid the threat of Spectrum World War brinkmanship. This was an expanded, global, digital dance at the edge of oblivion.

And then there was the increased levels of terrorist propaganda. The Internet and social media were suddenly swarming with aggressive ISIS chat sites, videos, games, and Twitter feed propaganda messages, targeted specifically toward vulnerable, young American Cybergens, poaching on their disenfranchisement, isolation, and bitterness. U.S. cyber defense efforts were seen to stand helplessly by, watching this propaganda poisoning of the Cybergen super-digital mind via the Internet, across America, from the Boston Marathon to San Bernardo, CA, seemingly unable to help.

The Doomsday Clock, after no movement since 1984 during the time of the Nuclear Cold War, suddenly lost two full minutes on January of 2015. This, because of mounting evidence of an approaching Full Spectrum Cyber World War…a war the Cybergen brain trust would be best equipped to fight. We are now engaged in a Cyber-Cold War, not unlike one that was waged many years ago, against the Russians, by a President called Reagan.

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BOOK DEDICATION - REAGAN’S INTERENT

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This is the calm within the gathering, Cyber-Cold War storm. We can find value in a historically similar era of Cold War. In 1981, the first year of Reagan’s Presidency, the Internet’s technological development was seen by the military as an alternative communications technology in the event of a nuclear war. The Internet had, however, great appeal to the private sector, mainly among university researchers. On the eve of Reagan’s first year in office, a program called the World Wide Web was created (1980). In Ronald Reagan’s first year as President, IBM announced the development of the first personal computer (Microsoft created DOS). In 1983 Cisco Systems was founded, along with domain names including .org, .net, .edu, .gov, and .com. In 1984 Apple Computer introduced the Macintosh, and the term cyberspace was coined. In 1987, there were 25 million PCs sold in the U.S. By 1989, the Reagan Presidency saw 100,000 hosts on the Internet.

Further, ARPNRT (now DARPA), marked January 1st, 1983 as the real-world birth of the Internet, in the third year of Reagan’s first term in office. TC/PIP was placed in the public domain, emerging in 1989, the last year of President Reagan’s second term.

The listing of the ‘Star Wars’ technological arsenal outlined by President Reagan during his March 23rd, 1985 nationally televised address, was mind boggling. The Strategic Defensive Initiative (SDI) revealed, in detail to the world, the deployment of thousands of intermediate and long-range missiles in silos in Russia and the US. Atomic warheads were poised to annihilate the civilized world. In his ‘Star Wars’ speech, President Reagan announced a program of mutual dismantlement. He called it his ‘zerozero’ plan. This was mentioned amid an announcement of a massive buildup of American ICBMs, and the deployment of space weapon technology.

No one yet knew a similar sounding term ‘zero-day exploit’, a technology that would have a vastly different meaning years in the future. The strength of the US space defense initiative could have spurred a further buildup of hostilities in the Cold War. The missile-gap engendered paranoia. But because it represented such a dynamic, generational leap in defensive space technologies, it made a massive Soviet ICBM launch seem strategy futile. The USSR calculated that the Star Wars system would tip the nuclear balance toward the United States. The Soviets feared that the SDI would enable the United States to launch a first-strike against them. This prospect was powerful enough to bring Mr. Brezhnev and Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov to the negotiating table. The youthful BoomerGens, X/Y-Gen demographic brain trust of the time were inspired by decisive Reagan leadership and hungered to learn more about emerging technologies.

Considering all this remarkable technology, it can be said with confidence that Ronald Reagan was America’s first ‘Internet President’, as so much of the early planning and development of the SDI, DARPA and particularly the Internet was done under his watch. The Reagan Internet Era did not just transpire. It was led. The Regan Star Wars speech was directed to the American scientific and technological community of the time. They were Depression Gens, Boomer Gens, X-Gens and Y-Gens (See Chart 1.1.) with good work ethics and a spirit of national pride. They respected the man in the Presidential Office, and Ronald Reagan knew how to inspire and to lead them.

The Cybergens are the first generation to have minds that are 100% digital from birth. They will bring provocative change to the world because of their super-digital acumen. They are a powerful brain trust, a priceless resource. Cybergens are pure digital and can digitally out think Y-Gens and Millennials, making them look slow and confused, if only in measured nanoseconds. But they are in danger of being lost to America.

Cybergens possess an ideological disengagement from their peers, who still have a love affair with Silicon Valley. Cybergens are dispirited, paranoid, and rebellious in these, their adolescent years. They will arrive at adulthood with a distrust of their country, which has failed to provide them with basic safety from cyber theft and propaganda incursions into their digital world. They have fled to the Darknet, their identities stolen, their computers hacked, their social media purged, and their dream of a free and open Internet seen to be slowly destroyed.

The warning signs are everywhere. A paradigm shift has torn the Cybergen demographic so violently away from their patriotic birthright, so as to set them adrift. This is tantamount to losing an entire generation. Cybergens are the most isolated, and the most susceptible group to terrorist propaganda. Ironically, they are the most sought-after recruits by Homeland Security and the cyber-military. They may reject these recruiting efforts. Much of Cybergen disenfranchisement is due to a lead-from-behind President, elected during their most impressionable years, whose failed economic policies have offered no jobs, no hope, and no change. This disgruntlement forms the basis for young Cybergens to ‘turn’ against their country, under the constant pressure of social media propaganda from ISIS.

This poses a danger that the very Cybergens that we covet for their digital brains trust can be turned against us. American air strikes in Syria and elsewhere in that ‘far war’ environment have provoked angry, lone-wolf sympathizers to carry out ‘near war’ attacks. The homeland is at risk, according to the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI. Strikes against Muslim lands will mean increased threats by homeland violent extremist. The ‘far war / near war’ response is more likely to be immediate, as the grievances are fresh and raw.

(See bulletin: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/syrian-airstrikes-raise-lone-wolf-terror-threat-us/story?id=25711147)

There is a new paradigm shift in the radicalization process just being realized by those defending America from homeland attacks. This phenomenon is a ‘blind-indoctrination’ process, where a citizen, having no contact with any terrorist organization and never exposed to training regimens, is self-radicalized. The ‘turned’, youthful citizen is exposed solely to online social media propaganda. They will be motivated to commit acts of violence against their home country. This shift in hostilities, by citizens without any terrorist-tied family or related religious history to ‘far war’ conflicts, is of great concern to authorities.

Stemming the tide of anti-American propaganda, including literature, videos, online games, chat sites, social media Twitter and Facebook presence, and Deep Web / Darknet websites is an ongoing battle. Many of the combatants are young, thirteen to twenty-something Cybergens.

(http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/16/politics/​homeland-security-lone-wolf/index.html)

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CHAPTER ONE

CYBERGENS:

THE SEEDS OF ANARCHY

How the Government Is Losing the Trust of an Entire Generation of Young Cybergens.

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On November 4th, 2005 a twenty-year-old man from Downey, California hacked the Department of Defense (DoD). ‘It was the first of its kind and a stark reminder that even the most secure computer system is vulnerable’, noted the US Attorney’s Office spokesperson in the Central District of California. According to the seventeen-count indictment, Jeanson Ancheta wrote malicious computer code that was spread to a chain of infected computers. This 'botnet' was then sold to others, distributing denial-of-service attacks and sending junk e-mails. The computers hacked were at the Weapons Division of the U.S. Naval Warfare Center, in China Lake, CA, and computers owned by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

(Source: http://gcn.com/articles/2005/11/04/hacker-arrested-for-breaching-dod-systems-with-botnets.aspx).

Ancheta’s profile is one of a young, home-grown terrorist attacking a military installation with motivations of financial gain and anti-government intent. Could this be the first Cybergen persona of his kind? The psychographic profile of a Cybergen begins at birth, where he or she enters a world that is 100% digital. This is significant. 100% digital literacy at birth means this generation is a digital step ahead of anyone else out there. It also means a 100% realtime dependency on a virtual world that is increasingly in chaos. There is no memory of wires leading to anything important.

Cybergens have the ability to live and multitask in realtime, with instant access to all things virtual. Fully Literate Internet Tribes or FLITs are the live-in occupiers of the Internet. They are students, political groups, company knowledge workers, front office salespersons, factory fulfillment operators, gamers and game builders; all are youthful, digital players who are both an impure mix of younger Millennials, and pure Cybergens. They are valuable because of their super ability to meld instantly with the network, and dangerous because they can hack it. Their lives are filled with the dynamics of hacking activity.

The Snowden revelations of NSA theft of their identities via data dumps by phone companies, plus Silicon Valley brand name company compliance in this clandestine treachery, has demolished the protective walls of their passage toward adulthood. It was understood. Dishonesty was everywhere.

Hacking is the ‘new normal’. The Internet had passed its era of enlightenment, and was headed for the abyss. Cybergens were born to the cusp of the Internet Dark Ages, signaled by the takeover of the Internet by the FCC. Discoveries that every commercial firewall was hackable, because of backdoor flaws designed by encryptoligists themselves, were unsettling. Everyone’s personal identity was already stolen…these were givens. No doubting that. It was just the way online life was like, in the digital wilderness.

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November 24th, 2014, Sony Pictures Entertainment was hacked. It was attacked, allegedly, because of a soon-to-be-released movie, ‘The Interview’, a comedy that insulted the North Korea leader Kim Jong-un. Korea denied responsibility and it has been suggested that Sony Pictures employees, or others, were responsible for the hacking of the Company. Cybersecurity firms and others suggest that the attack was outsourced to homegrown hacker mercenaries by North Korea. The attackers claimed to have taken over 100 terabytes of data, making it a devastating loss. Sony Pictures dealt with the infrastructure damages to the tune of $15 million in just the first quarter of 2015.

Target’s security and payments system was attacked by domestic and/or foreign terrorists. Hackers installed malware that, in the later months of 2013, stole 40 million credit card numbers along with 70 million addresses, phone numbers, and other pieces of personal information from 1,797 U.S. stores, even after the Company had installed a $1.6 million malware detection tool. The responsible anti-cyberattack vendor, whose customers also included military entities such as the CIA and the Pentagon, installed the detection tool. Target’s was, at that time, the biggest retail hack in U.S. history.

Home Depot announced a breach in its payments systems, putting as many as 56 million cards at risk. The home-improvement retailer hackers exposed shopper’s credit and debit card numbers and information hacked from 2,000 stores in US and Canada. The attack happened on September 2nd of 2014. There were suggestions that the Company did not heed repeated security warnings and had failed to install the intrusion prevention feature in its software suite.

JPMorgan Chase was attacked by hackers using malware that infected employee desktop computers, enabled by a phishing web attack. The August, 2014 attack seemed to be a series connected to recent hacks of European banks that exposed a ‘zero-day’ flaw in the Bank’s web server software to gain access to the corporate network. Some suspect foreign government (Russian) involvement. A zero-hour or zero-day attack, on the commercial level, is a cyber-threat that exploits an unknown flaw in the operating system. Developers have no time to address and patch the flaw, and programmers had zero time to fix it.

In all of the above institutions, the security breaches were massive. Graphic 1.1, shows an over-simplification of the standard corporate site being hacked. A communication tool is used to attain access through a specific vulnerability in the Application Server, and establishes an intrusion route. Graphic 1.1 shows a relief of how hackers exploited one or more security holes, hacking into an Application Server behind two Web Servers and two Firewalls, into the albeit secure company infrastructure, and stealing account information.

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Cybergens, with their 100% digital literacy from birth, can walk into a programmer or data entry job, and in a few hours have the Company data center mapped out in their minds. That, along with all its weaknesses. It’s who they are. It’s how they think. US Director of National Intelligence declared ‘cyberthreats as the greatest danger facing the Nation, with Terrorism now in second place’ (James Clapper, 7/2013). Since then, there has been a fuzzy line of distinction between the two, as foreign and domestic terrorists now engage in cyberattacks against both military and domestic targets.

The Cybergen mind holds a 100% digital view of reality, seeing the cyber world exponentially different from any previous generation. They utilize encrypted technologies, where most of us still remain clueless. This is true domestically and for terrorists abroad. Cybergens are wary of all things networked. So, when they were aware that representatives from the Department of Homeland Security were visiting their high schools, college campuses, and university graduations, looking for the best hackers in the class, they were suspicious. US government agencies, including DHS and the Pentagon, were intent on identifying young Cybergens with the highest hacking skills, not for arrest, but for recruitment. The illegal hacking skills, it seems, were also the desired skill-set for ‘cyber warriors’.

Mar 27, 2013: The US Department of Homeland Security hired hundreds of young, college-age hackers to help counter an alarming number of daily incursions into the nation's electrical grid and financial networks. According to DHS head at the time, Janet Napolitano, these enrolees will be ‘hackers for good,’ and the Department currently had a need for about 600 of them. The need to develop a skilled cyber work force has been a common, and formidable challenge for a number of US government agencies, including DHS and the Pentagon. That is because most skilled ‘cyber-warriors,’ as the US military calls them, often get recruited by private industry. According to the DHS, young hackers,