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Cyber warfare: The corporate community about 6 hours ago
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Cyber warfare: The intelligence community about 6 hours ago
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Cyber warfare: The military community about 6 hours ago
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U.S. is Striking Back in the Global Cyberwar on 2009-11-18
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Offensive cyberwar itself can encompass espionage, intercepting communications, and disabling computers and other infrastructure. The United States has those capacities, but the scope of the arsenal receives far less ink than the status of the country's defense. The Obama administration issued a report on that aspect in May and announced the creation of a cybersecurity czar to organize defense. But the sections of the report that address the country's offense remain highly classified, according to officials familiar with its contents. That's frustrating to many people in the national security field. "The only way that deterrence works is if the other side knows that you have weapons and the willingness to use them," says Charles Dodd, an expert in cyberwar at the security firm Nicor Global, who advises the House Armed Services Committee on cyberthreats sponsored by foreign nations.
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Despite the secrecy, brief glimpses of several cyberwar incursions have surfaced recently. The New York Times reported this year, for example, that some of the best information the intelligence community has collected on the Iranian nuclear program came from a hack into that country's computer networks.
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NSA's Tailored Access Operation Group
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focused on monitoring communications
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In 2004, Thomas Reed, a retired senior national security official, revealed the extraordinary story of how the CIA tricked the Soviet Union into stealing doctored software that later destabilized the trans-Siberian gas pipeline. That fancy bit of hacking caused a massive explosion in a wilderness section of the pipeline in 1982 that was visible from space and equivalent in size to that of a 3-kiloton nuclear weapon
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in 2001 a special committee of the European Union's Parliament accused the United States of using its Echelon global spy network to steal secrets that enabled U.S. companies to beat the European consortium, Airbus, to aircraft contracts in the mid 1990s.
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"The U.S. doesn't define what constitutes an act of cyberwar, so countries like China—while publicly denying it—are going full speed ahead to take advantage of us," says Nicor Global's Dodd. "It would be good to see the government putting some money behind offensive capabilities to fight back."
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TransTracker on 2009-11-18
Uh...what? Because haven't/don't define what an act of cyber war is, the Chinese are attacking us, which in turn requires the development and use of offensive capabilities?? That makes no sense.
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Tech sabotage during the Cold War on 2009-11-18
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The Cyberwar Plan on 2009-11-13
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At the request of his national intelligence director, Bush ordered an NSA cyberattack on the cellular phones and computers that insurgents in Iraq were using to plan roadside bombings. The devices allowed the fighters to coordinate their strikes and, later, post videos of the attacks on the Internet to recruit followers. According to a former senior administration official who was present at an Oval Office meeting when the president authorized the attack, the operation helped U.S. forces to commandeer the Iraqi fighters'
communications system. With this capability, the Americans could deceive their adversaries with false information, including messages to lead unwitting insurgents into the fire of waiting U.S. soldiers.
Former officials with knowledge of the computer network attack, all of whom requested anonymity when discussing intelligence techniques, said that the operation helped turn the tide of the war. Even more than the thousands of additional ground troops that Bush ordered to Iraq as part of the 2007 "surge," they credit the cyberattacks with allowing military planners to track and kill some of the most influential insurgents.
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Some journalists have obliquely described the effectiveness of computerized warfare against the insurgents. In The War Within, investigative reporter Bob Woodward reports that the United States employed "a series of top-secret operations that enable [military and intelligence agencies] to locate, target, and kill key individuals in extremist groups such as Al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgency, and renegade Shia militias. ... " The former senior administration official said that the actions taken after Bush's May 2007 order were the same ones to which Woodward referred. (At the request of military and White House officials, Woodward withheld "details or the code word names associated with these groundbreaking programs.")
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Cyber-defenders know what to prepare themselves for because the United States has used the kinds of weapons that now target the Pentagon, federal agencies, and American corporations. They are designed to steal information, disrupt communications, and commandeer computer systems. The U.S. is forming a cyberwar plan based largely on the experience of intelligence agencies and military operations. It is still in nascent stages, but it is likely to support the conduct of conventional war for generations to come. Some believe it may even become the dominant force.
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Over the past few years, however, the cyber-cohort has gained influence among the ranks of military strategists, thanks in large part to the ascendancy of Gen. Petraeus. The man widely credited with rescuing the U.S. mission in Iraq is also a devotee of "information operations," a broad military doctrine that calls for defeating an enemy through deception and intimidation, or by impairing its ability to make decisions and understand the battlefield. In past conflicts, the military has jammed enemy communication systems with electromagnetic waves or dropped ominous leaflets from planes warning enemy forces of imminent destruction. Today, cyber-warriors use the global telecommunications network to commandeer an adversary's phones or shut down its Web servers. This activity is a natural evolution of the information war doctrine, and Petraeus has elevated its esteem.
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Military officers describe cyberspace as the fifth domain of war, after land, sea, air, and space. But cyberspace is unique in one important respect -- it's the only battlefield created by humans.
"We have invented this, and it cuts across those other four," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Harry Raduege, who ran the Defense Information Systems Agency from 2000 to 2005.
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"You can't win the cyberwar if you don't win the war for talent," said Max Stier, the president of the Partnership for Public Service, an advocacy group that helped write the study. The co-author was Booz Allen Hamilton, the government contracting firm where former intelligence Director McConnell now runs the cyber-security business.
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The Defense Department graduates only about 80 students per year from schools devoted to teaching cyber-warfare. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has said that the military is "desperately short" of cyber-warriors and that the Pentagon wants four times as many graduates to move through its teaching programs over the next two years.
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On May 5 of this year, lawmakers on the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism and Unconventional Threats and Capabilities asked the NSA's Alexander whether the attacks on Estonia and Georgia met the definition of cyberwar. "On those, you're starting to get closer to what would be [considered war]," he said. "The problem you have there is who -- the attribution."
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The U.S. conducted its first focused experiments with cyberattacks during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, when it intervened to stop the slaughter of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. An information operations cell was set up as part of the bombing campaign. The cell's mission was to penetrate the Serbian national air defense system, published accounts and knowledgeable officials said, and to make fake signals representing aircraft show up on Serbian screens. The false signals would have confused the Serbian response to the invasion and perhaps destroyed commanders' confidence in their own defenses.
According to a high-level military briefing that Federal Computer Week obtained in 1999, the cyber-operation "could have halved the length of the [air] campaign." Although "all the tools were in place ... only a few were used." The briefing concluded that the cyber-cell had "great people," but they were from the "wrong communities" and "too junior" to have much effect on the overall campaign. The cyber-soldiers were young outsiders, fighting a new kind of warfare that, even the briefing acknowledged, was "not yet understood."
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Only four years after the war in Yugoslavia, planners again held off on releasing a potentially virulent weapon against Iraq. In the plan to disable the Iraqi banking network in advance of the U.S. invasion, the Pentagon determined that it might also bring down French banks and that the contagion could spread to the United States.
"It turns out that their computer systems extend well outside Iraq," a senior Air Force official told Aviation Week & Space Technology in March 2003. "We're also finding out that Iraq didn't do a good job of partitioning between the military and civilian networks. Their telephone and Internet operations are all intertwined. Planners thought it would be easy to get into the military through the telephone system, but it's all mixed in with the civilian [traffic]. It's a mess." This official said that to penetrate the military systems, the United States would risk what planners began calling "collateral computer network attack damage."
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Because of the widespread damage that cyber-weapons can cause, military and intelligence leaders seek presidential authorization to use them. "They're treated like nuclear weapons, so of course it takes presidential approval," the former military officer said. McConnell, the ex-intelligence director, has compared the era of cyberwar to "the atomic age" and said that a coordinated attack on a power grid or transportation or banking systems "could create damage as potentially great as a nuclear weapon over time."
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The Obama administration's former White House chief of cyber-security, Melissa Hathaway, has called for international cyberspace agreements. In a number of speeches in 2008 while still with the Bush administration, Hathaway proposed a Law of the Sea Treaty for the Internet, which, she said, is the backbone of global commerce and communications, just as the oceans were centuries ago.
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The odds for a broad international framework aren't good, however.
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In September, a panel of national security law experts convened by the American Bar Association and the National Strategy Forum, a Chicago-based research institute, concluded that the prospects for any multinational agreement are bleak. "The advantages of having a cyber-warfare capacity are simply too great for many international actors to abjure its benefits," the panel stated.
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In this historical analogy, experts have embraced a Cold War deterrent to prevent the cyber-Armageddon that military and intelligence officials have been warning about -- mutually assured destruction.
Presumably, China has no interest in crippling Wall Street, because it owns much of it. Russia should be reluctant to launch a cyberattack on the United States because, unlike Estonia or Georgia, the U.S. could fashion a response involving massive conventional force. The United States has already learned that it makes no sense to knock out an enemy's infrastructure if it disables an ally's, and possibly America's own. If nations begin attacking one another's power grids and banks, they will quickly exchange bombs and bullets. Presumably, U.S. war planners know that. And it may be the most compelling reason to keep their cyber-weapons sharp but use them sparingly.
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Cyber warfare: Communities on 2009-11-10
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In many cases of the modern world “cyber” refers to the computers that command and control networks and weapons systems. However, it is also apparent that it gets stretched far beyond command and control.
The metaphors of cyber warfare are partially to blame. In trying to force cyber warfare into a metaphor it is denigrated and castigated as much as it is heralded with miraculous powers. The better case is that metaphors and analogies are rife with systemic bias of the community positing the miraculous conceptual allegory. Over the next few days we’ll look at the metaphorical and allegorical analysis along with the biases of the different communities. This is all in part the written notes of a book chapter I’m preparing for the Cyber Conflict Studies Association.
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Metaphors at War in Cyberspace on 2009-11-10
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Sabotaging The System - 60 Minutes - CBS News on 2009-11-10
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“Useful But Prohibited”: Air Force Openness Lags on 2009-10-28
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Some of the steps that are favored by the Obama Administration to open up government to public access and participation may be “useful” but they are nevertheless “prohibited” on U.S. Air Force web sites, according to a new Air Force policy instruction.
In a January 21, 2009 memorandum on transparency and open government, President Obama directed that “Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public…. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.”
The U.S. Air Force has a different vision, however.
A new Air Force policy on public communications (pdf) observed that “web-based message boards, threaded chat rooms, and guest books… allow users to post opinions, messages, or information openly on a web site. They provide a useful means of creating two-way communication but are prohibited as part of public web site services (sec. 10)”
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The impact of the President’s January memorandum has been deferred because the implementing Open Government Directive that was originally due for release in May has still not been completed.
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TransTracker on 2009-10-28
This seems to be a theme with the Obama Administration. The 60 day cybersecurity policy review took longer than it was supposed to. A cybersecurity czar still hasn't been appointed. We're still waiting on a decision about Afghanistan strategy. And the Open Government Directive is 5 months overdue. Does anyone else detect a decision-making problem at the White House?
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