Slashdot Mirror
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
I've seen lots of articles about the various "information warfare" scenarios. The impression I've gathered is that it just isn't that big of a threat. In the past we've had break-ins to US military computers, but outside of the negative publicity, not much came of it (didn't the famous late '80s German attacks only result in copies of VMS reaching East Germany?).
The various commercial web sites are another matter, but none of them are critical to anyones life, and if eBay or someone were to be broken into, very few people (and one company) would really suffer.
Now if that one cracker were to instead get into the US and begin shooting people from the trunk of a car, or go hijack a commercial plane, the damage would be far greater, and less education would be required to pull it off.
(There was an article on the Register about this about a month ago)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.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
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
Subversive Iraqi Geek: "Imagine beowulf cluster of these!"
US Newscaster: "The idea behind the 'Thermonuclear Anthrax Cluster Bomb' is to take a lot of less powerful diseases, like the kind availible to the home consumer, and make them work together like one big disease."
The Office of Homeland Security: "The site 'Slashdot.org' appears to be planning terrorist actions. They say that they have a force at least as powerful as the Iraqi military."
GWB: "Terrorist Regimes, Dictators developing weapons of mass destruction, Internet users, and other evil-doers, must be stopped!"
Slashdot: "Here's a copy of the letter we got demanding that we turn over our server logs, and our responce. Post comments below."
Slashdot Poll: "The government's responce to our November 22nd posting on information warfare is:
A violation of our rights!
Perfectly acceptable considering the situation in Iraq
No surprise.
The perfect excuse for the DDOS attack I just started!
CowboyNeal is hiding in a mountain cabin somewhere in the northwest
The Office of Homeland Security: "Slashdot is encouraging a massive DDOS attack in responce to recent charges against it."
US Newscaster: "33% of inside sources have told us that terrorist leader CowboyNeal is hiding out in a mountain cabin somewhere in the northwest, though some have been quoted as saying "I'm in Canada, you insensitive clod!"."
Bin Ladin: "The recent uhh.. DDOS attacks.. are a great sign from.. what the hell is this shit? I thought I told you freaks to blow up buildings!"
Lord Bitman: "People who claim not to take this post seriously take this post way too seriously"
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
The problems with this whole scenario (and the whole lot of the 'doom and gloom' information warfare scenarios that the US Government and cronies have been pumping out for the past few years) are legion. Before anyone shoves a pamphlet at me, let me state that I have *worked* for RAND doing analysis and I've *read* the books. Here are, in my opinions, the problems as I see them.
1) Definition. In order to effectively do nasty things to the US using 'information warfare' you need to know what the heck IW is. Guess what: we don't. The US Military has 'Information Operations' but those are mostly modern takes on tactics and strategies that go back at least as far as Sun Tzu, and involve attempting to retain and collect information on the situation while denying the same to the enemy. We keep hearing about how vulnerable stuff on the internet is to tampering. There are horror stories almost weekly about how some hacker almost succeeded in shutting down LA's power, or almost took out an air traffic control node, etc. etc. Which of these is IW? All of them? Some?
2) Scale of Effort. Really, at some point, taking down LA's power grid is a lot more easily done by bribing Enron or by tossing some hand grenades over the fence at a substation than by hacking. Here's a quick exercise. Think of a bad scenario. Now figure out how many separate intrusions would probably be required to cause it, and then figure out how many of them would need to be done simultaneously. Sure, you might be able to get into a lot of the places than can cause harm - but to do so catastrophically and as a surprise attack, you'd need to access a lot of them at the same time. First of all, that means you'd need to set up access in advance (forget the movies, kids, hackers don't 'get into systems' in the space of time it takes to get fellated by John Travolta's hookers). Now, you have to suppose that all of those prior intrusions have not set off alarms, either through intrusion detection or through simple damage and response, so that they'll all work flawlessly when you need them.
3) Differentiation. You need to make sure that the failures you trigger don't just look like reg'lar old failures. Why? Because those actually happen all the time, and there are plans and general states of mind for those. A large portion of the effectiveness of 'InfoWar' as it's thrown around by the press seems to rest on 'shock value' like most traditional military operations. The problem is that instead of trying to cause confusion at a single point (the opposing commander), InfoWar is trying to panic a population's worth of responders (the sysadmins and troubleshooters who maintain the systems under attack). As far as those go, each 'component' failure will have to work hard to look different from things they worry about every day. There's no central authority (other than the stupid departments and agencies the US Gov't is busy setting up) to panic and spread the paralysis panic causes. Note: the root name servers suffered a fairly nasty attack just a while ago. Most internet users didn't notice. I'm sure some pulses were raised at the root server level, but that's a scenario they think about all the time.
4) Connectivity. Think about this carefully. What, precisely, can you get to via the internet, and how would you do it? Let's start at the attacker's end. So you're an Iraqi geek. Well, until the mid-to-late 1990s, you didn't have a single internet connection in the entire damn country; your national web pages were hosted in Jordan, and the U.S. Gov't was assiduously bombing all means of connecting with the outside world. Let's take an easily believable step and say you're a group of Iraqi geeks who've been prepositioned in internet cafes around the world! You're set! You're ready to go! Okay, um, what are you attacking? Again, those 'deep intrusion' hacks we keep reading about (like the recent British arrest) are done by people who have spent enormous amounts of time and effort getting into these systems in the first place, time that you likely don't have if you don't want to get nailed before IW-Day.
Other end. What are you attacking? There are all manner of horror stories about electrical switches and the like connected to the internet. Most of them ignore the fact that many of these examples are connected to the internet for MONITORING purposes and don't in fact accept input. There are, of course, those that do; however, again, they are designed to assume that at some point they'll lose connectivity, and should operate autonomously or manually. Why? Because 'The Internet' breaks alllll on its own more often than it gets attacked.
InfoWar would be a lot more frightening to me if it could be clearly and precisely defined, and done so in a way that CLEARLY explains why and how it would be a) more effective and b) easier than having sleeper agents in twenty-five cities toss hand grenades at telephone switching offices.
A hero is someone who knows when to run away. I am a hero. -Trent the Uncatchable
It's this sort of thinking that scares the hell out of me. Sooner or later somebody is going to give the US a bloody nose. It's already been demonstrated in the war games that senior US tacticans are unable to respond to guerilla warfare. The US did of course capture Al Queda did it not?
If an organisation were to set up shop in the US I think it would be almost impossible to catch them. Why was the DC sniper team caught? Imagine if they were part of an organised team. They would not have been caught. Now imagine there teams in 10 cities. The first teams goes down the second team starts up. Think that wouldn't cause problems? Now throw in cheap EMP weapons near major comuunications links. Then some shoulder weapons at the end of two or three runways.
Bush goes into Iraq get ready for the war to start in the US.