Slashdot Mirror
Is There a Cyberwar, and Is the US Losing It?
kenblakely writes "BusinessWeek is running a story asserting that the 'US
is Losing the Global Cyberwar.' This whole
cyberwar thing has been discussed a few times on Slashdot where the Chinese are asserted to be using
cyberwarfare to attain military superiority. And, of course, there is
the whole Russia-Georgia thing. Even
the US military is getting in on the action, and the fear
of a cyber
Pearl Harbor seems almost palpable. I'm curious
what the Slashdot crowd thinks about the growing fascination with 'cyberwar':
hype to get more money and create new force structure, source of the next
world war, or somewhere in between?"
Can the Chinese traceroute laser guided bombs away from their datacenters? The people with the most bombs usually win...
And re: Chinese investments in the U.S. - should China go to war with us, they will be screwed...all the paper debt they've created with the United States will become a clean slate; thanks for the free money suckers!
Disrupting, monitoring and tapping into the enemy's command and control systems, lines of communication, etc. is as old as warfare. What make sit news is that you now can do it from well within your own borders, often undetected, combined with the increasing reliance on electronic networking for C3 makes the threat more serious. As a result, countries are paying more attention to the offensive potential and defensive needs to protect their networks while making other's vulnerable. Same game, just different playtoys.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
"There is no "cyberwar". BusinessWeek is losing it."
... so we have to keep enduring this constant background misinformation static noise.
Unfortunately the word "Cyberwar", when used by non-technical news companies, is often used to (wrongly) imply organized big scale attacks, as if its a military style war/attack. Its far more likely just mostly isolated young (and/or misguided older) hackers on all sides, having a go at hacking/annoying the opposing sides. Not much different from kids throwing stones at the other side, just the 21st century version of it.
But then we live in a time of media organized waves of ever more fear and paranoid, so things get blown up out of all proportion by them, (for their own gain). BusinessWeek is just playing along to the common theme of selling a story of fear and paranoid, to get peoples attention. Sadly this marketing/PR tactic works. Now people are discussing Cyberwar and in the process BusinessWeek is gaining greater attention. Its not about Cyberwar, its about BusinessWeek's need for attention.
I wish companies would stop playing this fear manipulation game, to get attention. But then I guess all the time this method works, they will keep exploiting it, for their own gain
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
No, BusinessWeek is being pulled into a very interesting game. There is a *ton* of posturing and jockeying for attention going on with the incoming administration (primary example is the DoD compromise story...how many versions of that story came out?). These stories are aimed at getting the transition teams to say "hey, yeah, that team/project/agency over there really does need more funding."
Yes, the Chinese military has decided exactly this, and it's been in Chinese doctrine for a decade. It's clear in Chinese military publications, and even a cursory literature review of Chinese journals finds a consistent message: China can defeat superior enemies by utilizing information warfare against information dependent-states, particularly the United States, and it must have a diligent, long-term view to do it successfully.
If China spends 15 years shaping American public opinion -- including that of politicians in power, or who come to power -- that military conflict with China must be avoided at all costs, even in a scenario where China invades Taiwan, has the goal not been accomplished? If China is able to temporarily blind US command and control to give it enough time to become entrenched in a symbolic region, has the goal not been accomplished?
China believes it, and China has embraced the idea of using principles of information warfare -- from long-term PSYOP, to public relations, to coordinated computer attack, to "useful idiots" without any government affiliation doing the Party's bidding for the "good of China" -- to skip the full extent of the costly and painful military-industrial modernization it would take to counter an adversary like the US in a conventional war.
Well, we've been in a long standing economic war. We don't even notice it. You know how many countries the US has a trade embargo with, and tries to convince other countries to follow suit? Of course, if you cut of a country from a sizable market, it gets into troubles.
Thinking about it, a lot of international politics of the US in the latter half of the 20th century had a bit of warfare. We just don't notice it that much. Replacing Allende with Pinochet, because the former dared to kick foreign investors out of his country, surely wasn't such a nice move. And inciting Saddam to start a war in the middle east because some Ayatollah kicked their buddy's butt wasn't so nice either. Neither was later using him as a scapegoat whenever something went wrong internally.
But hey, that's politics. Is it war? Well, not in the way that we'd think of, but to some degree it was. The US were just clever enough to find someone stupid enough to do the dirty work for them.
Back on topic, is that now war? Well, certainly not in the usual kind. Maybe it's just another form of foreign politics, and the US are just pissed that now someone else is doing it to them instead of them pulling the strings.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not a cyberwar, it's government espionage. It's been done for as long as there have been governments, including the US going after nuclear and rocket scientist from Germany, and spying between the US and Russia during the cold war. Trying to steal government secrets that happen to be on a computer is nothing new. Covering your tracks, and maybe setting the other government back a bit in their research is normal. The US is almost certainly doing this today to all kinds of other countries. What did you think the NSA and CIA were doing before the war on terror started?
If this was an actual war, the foreign governments would be trying to destroy the US infrastructure via remote computer access. Open a few valves to flood our water supply with raw sewage, bring down the power grid in California, shutdown air traffic control, turn all stop lights to 4 way green during rush hour, etc. And major governments in the world just don't have an incentive to do this. China is already feeling the pain of owning too much US debt during our financial crisis and has seen their economy suffer as our imports slow. Africa keeps looking for foreign aid, India needs our outsourcing, and the middle east wants to sell us oil. Seeing how a housing bubble in the US has turned into a global recession, an organized government would be shooting themselves in the foot to start a war against the US now.
The exceptions to this would be Russia, and non-government affiliated terrorist groups (Al-Qaeda). Though Russia, like Brazil, is more talk than action. The risk with them is more from organized crime using computer bot-nets to profit from illegal activities.
Excepting the point that some level of corporate espionage occurs, the term "cyberwar" is misleading. It is hard to understand the military becoming actively involved in "internet warfare". Information warfare, on the other hand, should be an absolutely critical part of any modern military organization. Disrupting and intercepting enemy communications is a corner stone to any successful military operation, and this is nothing new. What the hell does this have to do with the internet? The internet does not serve as the communications hub for military organizations, it is instead a hub for commerce. Thus, in this sense, in an environment of total war -- taking out the internet "early and often" would make sense -- but isn't it easier to just bomb ISPs?
So in the cold war we had an arms race. Is this "cyberwar" going to start a bot race?
If you DDOS me, I will DDOS you!
We just need 300 Spartans to man the bottleneck link between here and China.