China Taking on U.S. in Cyber Arms Race

Pabugs writes with a CNN story about an uncomfortable development in world politics and information technology. According to General Robert Elder, an Air Force military man setting up a 'cyber command' in Louisiana's Barksdale Air Force Base, the nation of China is already in the process of developing their own 'cyber warfare' techniques. While Elder described the bulk of China's operations as focusing on espionage, they and others around the world have more serious goals in mind. "The Defense Department said in its annual report on China's military power last month that China regarded computer network operations -- attacks, defense and exploitation -- as critical to achieving "electromagnetic dominance" early in a conflict. China's People's Liberation Army has established information warfare units to develop viruses to attack enemy computer systems and networks, the Pentagon said. China also was investing in electronic countermeasures and defenses against electronic attack, including infrared decoys, angle reflectors and false-target generators, it said."

Comments

Cyber attacks

[Zarhan]

Ok, could somebody please explain to me what classifies as a cyber-attack? It seems all these are applicable only to public Internet, not private networks. What's all the fuss?

Targeted, distributed DDos against goverment websites? Ok. I can see that (see what happened in Estonia). Lots of mitigating technologies including but not limited to stuff like BGP blackholing and so on and the most obvious attack vector. However, is there really anything else?

Breaking into systems? Ok, but do you really have anything critical on a public webservers and other Internet-facing systems? This isn't the 80's when things like Cuckoo's Egg happened easily and some systems didn't even have passwords. Of course admins in several organizations are incompetent, but it's not like you could play Wargames (ie. launch nukes or similar), since those systems are not connected to Internet.

Mostly I'm thinking what exactly is the impact of all this? A temporarily blocked access to public websites? What else is there? "Cyber-attack" just seems a buzzword. What do they mean?

Or do they really have attacks going against private, supposedly secure networks (perhaps intercepting satellite communications or undersea fibers?)