The age of cyber-innocence is over. Not only has the British government finally published its national cyber-security strategy, but US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has announced a cyber-defense command under a four-star general at the Pentagon. The stage is set for NATO to engage in a cold war of the Web, along with Russia, China, India and Israel.
The Internet now plays a vital role in virtually every aspect of our lives. It is from this dependency on computer systems that a new realm of conflict — cyber-warfare — is emerging. The ultimate nightmare on this virgin battlefield is known by nicknames such as cyber-geddon or the Digital Pearl Harbor.
This is an attack on computers that run a country’s critical infrastructure — the electric grid, oil and gas supplies, water and communications. Scott Borg, who runs the US Cyber Consequences Unit think tank, argues that most countries can survive a major assault lasting two to three days, but if an enemy knocked out part of the critical infrastructure for eight to 10 days, the accumulated social and economic damage would bring a country to its knees.
Cyber-geddon is, however, a “high impact, low likelihood” attack. A much more credible threat is from the vast amounts of malware — viruses, trojans and worms — already circulating on the Web in their billions. Left to run amok, these could have equally devastating consequences on our lives.
The cost of cyber-crime attacks around the world runs into tens of billions of dollars every year — it is the fastest growing sector of criminal syndicates. But it is often impossible to identify if an attack is criminal in nature or has military implications. Already, the Pentagon is registering tens of millions of attempted attacks on its systems every day.
Over the past five years, a new species has emerged to deal with the problem — the cyber-securocrat, a peculiar hybrid of spook and geek proliferating quietly in governments throughout the West. Their first major problem lies in defining the issues. What constitutes an act of cyber-war — is it an actual attack? Is it the placing of sleeper viruses on a country’s electric grid, as the Chinese have done in the US? Or is it simply surveying a potential enemy’s capacity?
This conundrum is complicated by the very heart of cyber-war theory. In the original Cold War, the chief assets of the enemy were missiles with nuclear warheads; generally their location was common knowledge, as was the damage they could inflict and how long it would take them to inflict it.
In cyber-war, your assets lie in the degree of vulnerability of a potential enemy’s computer systems, so in order to know your own strength, you need to “invade” your opponent by developing an offensive capability.
NATO strategists have been debating this since the spring of 2007 when Russian hackers launched a series of distributed denial of service (D-DOS) attacks on the Baltic state of Estonia, which has one of the most advanced computer infrastructures in both NATO and the EU.
Last week the NATO-backed Co-operative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, based in the Estonian capital of Tallinn, held its inaugural annual conference, and the need and wisdom of creating an offensive strategy was center stage.
NATO’s hawks argue that unless you develop an active deterrence strategy and threaten your opponents with cyber-geddon, then you are critically vulnerable. The doves argue that it is neither in Chinese nor Russian interests to turn the Web into an arena of brinkmanship with the West, but almost all NATO cyber-strategists agree that Russia and China pose the most serious military threat to the West in cyber-space.
But while NATO continually discusses the meaning of attacks that they insist originated in Moscow and Beijing, they are more coy about talking about their own activities, save for the purely defensive.
There was some private discussion in Estonia last week about the US’ intimate knowledge of the computer systems of most major Middle Eastern powers, while Pentagon representatives have suggested that Syria’s air defense system was taken out by Israeli hackers in advance of Israel’s attack on Syria’s fledgling nuclear facility in September 2007.
The British cyber-security strategy notes demurely that it will “intervene against adversaries,” which means the government is not telling us what its offensive plans are. (To be fair, it does say that this would give potential enemies an advantage.)
One thing is certain: Levels of surveillance on the Internet, already advanced in countries such as Russia, China and Iran, are set to increase in the West as well. The Internet will still act as a hugely successful tool of commerce and communication. But the ability of the military and other security forces to patrol, observe and attack systems is now set to grow rapidly.
Misha Glenny, the author of McMafia: Seriously Organized Crime, is researching a book on cyber-crime and warfare.
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