Coming soon: More attacks on critical infrastructure? - The Diigo Meta page

• 20 Nov 08
  

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  This is very, very interesting. It seems to confirm my admittedly less-than-systematically-developed impressions about the real threat from "cyber attacks"--i.e. that denial of service, defacement, intrusion/theft do not constitute "real war." Based on Dorothy Denning's categories, most of this stuff is at the level of hactivism, not cyberterrorism or cyberwar. Or, maybe it would be more accurate to say that, as military activities, they are forms of PSYOPs or intelligence gathering.

  cyberwar intelligence infowar

  • Secure Computing’s third-quarter Internet Threat Report predicts that 2009 will see an increase in politically motivated attacks such as those experienced already in Estonia and Georgia (the nation, not the state).

    However, for the time being, the surreptitious theft of data from information technology systems, as Chinese hackers are alleged to have done in this country, is likely to remain a more serious threat.

    Cyber attacks against infrastructure haven’t risen to the level of real warfare or terrorism. Although the Estonian attacks, suspected of having been carried out by Russian partisans in a dispute between the nations, interfered with some online commerce, denial-of-service attacks seldom have more than nuisance value in disrupting some one-way communications from Web sites.

    Studies indicate that the wholesale disruption of systems is more difficult than often thought, and as systems become more diverse, interconnected and complex, bringing them down only becomes more difficult.

    For the foreseeable future, Internet warfare is likely to remain the domain of spooks operating under the radar rather than cyber attackers carpet-bombing our infrastructure.

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