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• 05 Jun 09
  

  TransTracker

  cyberwar

  • ANYONE who follows technology or military affairs has heard the predictions for more than a decade. Cyberwar is coming. Although the long-announced, long-awaited computer-based conflict has yet to occur, the forecast grows more ominous with every telling: an onslaught is brought by a warring nation, backed by its brains and computing resources; banks and other businesses in the enemy states are destroyed; governments grind to a halt; telephones disconnect; the microchip-controlled Tickle Me Elmos will be transformed into unstoppable killing machines.

  • But how bad would a cyberwar really be — especially when compared with the blood-and-guts genuine article? And is there really a chance it would happen at all?

    
    

    Whatever the answer, governments are readying themselves for the Big One.

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  • • Whatever form cyberwar might take, most experts have concluded that what happened in Estonia earlier this month was not an example.
    • Still, many in the security community and the news media initially treated the digital attacks against Estonia’s computer networks as the coming of a long-anticipated new chapter in the history of conflict — when, in fact, the technologies and techniques used in the attacks were hardly new, nor were they the kind of thing that only a powerful government would have in its digital armamentarium.
    • James Andrew Lewis, director of the Technology and Public Policy Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

    • Mr. Lewis stressed. “The idea that Estonia was brought to its knees — that’s when we have to stop sniffing glue,” he said.

      
      

      In fact, an attack would have borne real risks for Russia, or any aggressor nation, said Ross Stapleton-Gray, a security consultant in Berkeley, Calif. “The downside consequence of getting caught doing something more could well be a military escalation,” he said.

      
      

      That’s too great a risk for a government to want to engage in what amounts to high-tech harassment, Mr. Lewis said. “The Russians are not dumb,” he said.

      • 

        TransTracker on 2009-06-05

        And yet, in early 2009, CSIS jumped on the cyber-hysteria bandwagon, with a report that cites the Estonia example in a document meant for the President that seems to imply that simple DDoS and/or cyber-espionage should be considered acts of war!

    • Down on earth, by comparison, this correspondent found himself near the Kennedy Space Center in a convenience store without cash and with the credit card network unavailable. “The satellite’s down,” the clerk said. “It’s the rain.” And so the purchase of jerky and soda had to wait. At the center’s visitor complex, a sales clerk dealt with the same problem by pulling out paper sales slips.

      
      

      People, after all, are not computers. When something goes wrong, we do not crash. Instead, we find another way: we improvise; we fix. We pull out the slips.

      • 

        TransTracker on 2009-06-05

        Excellent point. Cyber-doom scenarios assume that people will respond to a massive attack with complete, paralyzing panic. But that didn't even happen during the massive strategic bombing campaigns of WWII. Instead, Londoners, for example, not only improvised, but they got pissed off...and more determined than ever to defeat their German attackers.

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  TransTracker on 2009-06-05
  And yet, in early 2009, CSIS jumped on the cyber-hysteria bandwagon, with a report that cites the Estonia example in a document meant for the President that seems to imply that simple DDoS and/or cyber-espionage should be considered acts of war!
• 
  TransTracker on 2009-06-05
  Excellent point. Cyber-doom scenarios assume that people will respond to a massive attack with complete, paralyzing panic. But that didn't even happen during the massive strategic bombing campaigns of WWII. Instead, Londoners, for example, not only improvised, but they got pissed off...and more determined than ever to defeat their German attackers.

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