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On the Possibility of Information Warfare?
denisonbigred asks: "With all of the talks about disarming Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and all of the news coming out about Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups use of technology, I tend to wonder what is being done about the possibility of informational warfare. There must be a few geeks over in Iraq, and angry, subversive, geeks must be at least as dangerous as Iraq's rag-tag army. Is this a legitimate concern, and does anyone know what, if anything, is being done to address it?"
I remember reading an article last year (in the New Scientist, i think) about how relatively easy it would be to build an EMP bomb within something roughtly the same size and shape as a pipe bomb.
Taking out inadequately shielded stock exchanges, major database centres, backup facilities, etc, would have frightening consequences.
$0.02
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
While 'information warfare' is important and all, I am far more worried bout regular warfare with guns, bombs, gas, and viruses than a couple downed routers. While the Iraqis could do damage, I do not think they could do anymore damage than any other enterprising cracker, hacker, or DDOS kiddie. Unless they are developing all new exploits that are 100% unknown by anyone else, the amount of damage they could do is not anything unusual compared to any other malicious group of people. I think people should focus on filtering out biochemical weapons and such from entering our country than a couple rouge packets. When all is said and done, security is in the hands of the adminstrators who are hopefully competentant to do their job if anything happens.
Its a matter of simple math for priorities:
DDOS attacks and such : Millions/Billions of dollars lost, productivity set back by several days, economy wobbles a little.
Chem/bio/nuclear weapon goes off in USA: thousands/millions killed, economy enters danger zones due to intense fears, world economy really shakes, martial law, major restrictions in freedom.
Personally, Id rather we loose millions/billions of dollars than see thousands/millions die. Keep in mind though, attacking (with real weapons) information-routing centers is a whole other matter and could be just as bad.
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
Unfortunatly, InfoWar isn't just hacking. According to the RAND publication "Strategic Information Warfare" ISBN: 0833023527
It deals with the various aspects of InfoWar and their implications. Your oversimpilification simply assumes that the worst possible thing would be a DDOS attack. Whereas you compare that to NBC (Nuclear,Bio, Chem) Weapontry.
InfoWarfare is roughly equivilent (in a strategic and policy sense) to terrorism mainly due to the fact that it does not recognize a "theatre" of war, and simply has the ability to target everything and everyone.
Like Intelligence Data, InfoWarfare is best used in conjunction with other avenues of attack. An attack on the communications infrastructure of our country (Disabling large chunks of the 'net and phone systems) with subsequent action to gain control of TV stations would have the same effect, in modern day terms, as the Dolittle raids. There, besides the staggering financial implications, would be little direct economic damage, but people would see that they could be hit that they are not invulnerable. This effect would be disasterous on the morale of this country and potenally adversly effect the poll standings of Bush. I say potentially becuase the Brittish, in the Battle of Brittain had much worse done to them and it only stiffened their resolve. But I digress.
Infowar is everything from hacking, propaganda, some aspects of intelligence gathering, to actually hurting people (If you can hack into a power/water plant and make it not be happy, life becomes very bad.) Also imagine if an Infowar attack disrupted the transportation mechinisms in this country for a week -- stores would start running out of food, mail wouldn't be delivered, people would absolutly panic.
The most dangerous aspect of InfoWar is the fact that it is the most easily done (You can be in a diffrent country and attack us) and most direcly reaching of attacks (Each person is directly confronted by the knowledge that they have been attacked.) While it cannot hold territory or cause enemy soldiers (unless of course one breaks into the C4I net) to break their positions, it becomes a fascinating secondary line of attack to break the morale of the country.
Here's something to think about. In the event of an 'Information Warfare'-type attack generated by a hostile entity (Iraq, The Taliban, North Korea, Richard Simons... etc.), what do you do?
In the case of a DDoS attack, would you try to isolate the thousands of zombie nodes spewing bad traffic or SYN packets or shut down the control-channel (often IRC or some other mechanism). If you thought thousands of badly admin'ed MTA's in china gave you headaches with spam, what happens when some hotshot cranks out a new DDoS package and melts your routers off their racks? I have horrible visions of something out of Brazil with FBI/NSA/HomelandSecurity/KeystoneKops kicking down the doors at NOC's around the country and shutting down IRC servers or pushing Tier-1 providers to shut down particular types of traffic.
Call me cynical but I doubt that MaeEast-West would have the cohones to stand up to a squad of MP's led by Ashcroft brandishing the Homeland Security Act.
Take this a step further, what happens when Dubya decides to throw weight with the countries in the middle-east that provide/sell terestrial bandwidth to said 'Axis of [Electronic] Evil'. I remember my mother being in Chinatown the day of the Tienamen Square massacre, people were running around with photocopies of faxes and e-mailed lists of the injured and on-the-spot reports. The deluge of information that managed to get out was because people were able to bypass the government's news-blackout. That was a country trying to hide it's internal operations from the global community, could our government justify such actions in the name of 'Stamping out Terrorism' or bringing a hostile government system down? I don't have a good feel for how completely we shut down the information/telcom infrastructre when we went into Iraq last time. News got out, cleaned up by press pools and government-directed self-censorship of the general media outlets, but did we really turn Iraq into an information dead-zone? (please, if anyone has any good links, post a reply and include 'em!)
I can understand the military strategy behind denying your enemy any information except what you allow (Machivelli was writing about this half a millenia ago), but what happens when you are able to do this to an entire country.
I can understand the need to put a lid on a farm of military backed 5cr1pt-K1ddes, but who prevents it from happening in our own backyard next time... hmmm
"If I wanted your input on my pet project, I'd stick my hand up your ass and use you like a sock-puppet." - Muse
If I were a nation or organization fighting the US (Asymetric Warfare or 4th Generation Warfare) I would use the cheap EMP mutions in theatre. When US forces attack, start exploding these things over the battlefield to negate the US hi-tech advantage and disrupt C4I.
The US forces depend very much up electronic superiority. So, I would train my forces in small unit, dispersed light infrantry tactics, and use the EMP muntions to throw off the US advanatage. I would use shoulder Launched weopons (RPG and similiar) and heavy machine gun (man portable) to go after Helicopters and other CAS aircraft. Maybe lurk in probable CAS approach lanes. Use lots of land mines and ambushes to cause casualties against agressive US forces. Also I would go for rear eschalon logistics type stuff (people, stores, vehicles, etc.)
Of course, I would set loose 10-500 urban snipers and/or terrorist in the US itself to cause mayhem and confusion. Have the snipers taget people randomly. Haved the terrorist target malls and high school football games and other group activities. Maybe especially concentrate around military bases so as to disrupt the families of those solders/airmen/marines/sailors deployed. Thsi will tie up dommestic INtelligence aganecies, the press, and distract decision makers.
Somebody will do this. It is only a matter of time. Most likely sooner rather then later.
Meanwhile, the Homeland Security Director has developed a pretty colored coded alert board.
Only a small part of information warefare is hacking.
i war.1.html
h ttp://www.d-n-i.net/second_level/fourth_generatio n_warfare.htm
http://www.infowar.com/
http://www.psycom.net/
http://www.fas.org/irp/wwwinfo.html
According to The CIA's World Factbook:
- Population 24 million
- Phone lines 675,000 (2.8% of the population)
- Internet accounts 12,500 (0.052% of the population)
If you consider that Internet access is obviously determined by political reliability, not technical prowness, how many Iraqi geeks with Internet access do you think exist?I know Iraq could have a special elite Geek Squad or something, but normally you need a pretty good pool of applicants to recruit from. In the case of Iraq, I don't see it as fertile ground for geeks to get needed experience, however motivated they may be to help Saddam.
Also, we know cracking is all about trial and error, and Iraqi geeks are bound to be intimidated by Saddam's "succeed or we kill you" policy. That doesn't exactly encourage the hacker ethic, does it?
So no, I'm afraid Iraqi mastery of this subject is a pipe dream. I could believe Al Queda operatives could conduct cyberwar, because most of them are in fairly free countries and could take advantage of people's grievances and resentments to learn.
But not Iraq. Forget Iraq.
D
There is no such thing as cyberterrorism, or cyberwar. These are buzzwords used by power seekers, and the technically illiterate people who really belived that Y2K would be the end of time.
How ya like dat?