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Chertoff Advocates Cyber Cold War
Jack Spine writes "The US and allied countries should formulate a doctrine to apply the principles of nuclear deterrence to cyber attacks and cyber espionage, according to former US Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff. No matter that it's very difficult to attribute the source of cyber attacks — just take punitive action against the platform being used to attack, says Chertoff."
The problem is collateral damage. What is more likely the nation of Elbonia is attacking the United States by DOSing an airport reservation system? or a competing airline hired some crackers to harm the competition, and those crackers have rooted some machines at the national ISP of Elbonia, that they do it with?
So we respond by routing the entire nation via 127.0.0.1, which is great in that it solves the problem but it probably denies all sorts of services to innocent people, and I am not talking about Mohamed's Netflix subscription, what about that X-Ray the surgeons there wanted a consult on, and the nations telephone system which is IP based at least for international calls. Oh and hey the assembly plant GM is trying to operate there, etc etc. All this is going to do is make small problems big ones.
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Just like vandalism, one way to deter it is to make it easier to reverse the damage, than to cause it in the first place. These are computers we are talking about here. If the problem is software based, filter the attacker, use versioned filesystems and revert the changes.
Perhaps. The operating theory here, I think, is that at some point, a government will stop doing such idiotic things as cyber warfare because the costs are too high. Just like the threat of economic sanctions.
Part of the problem, however, is that for all the "control" we might have over the internet, it's a global network that by design can't just be turned off like that. Personally, I think that good old fashioned, "Oh, you shutdown our air traffic control system? Here, we'll shut down your airspace by destroying anything that gets more than five feet off the ground." is more effective. Excessive? You bet. That's the whole bloody point of MAD. Cyberwarfare cannot be part of a MAD policy unless you are prepared to destroy the physical connections.
Frankly, this proposal sounds like someone doesn't understand how this works. Countries like China really don't give a hoot if you block them from the internet - they'll find a way around whatever blocks you put in place, and crush (literally) anyone who internally dissents against their policies. Most of the general public has no idea this is happening. Perhaps a better solution would be raising a stink in a very public fashion at the UN, getting an international treaty in place, and *then* make it your official policy to react to cyber attacks with real, physical attacks. Otherwise, this is going to just keep happening with no real danger of reprisal that means anything to most of the countries engaged in this. Meanwhile, those nations that aren't actively trying to break things (merely spy, which is quite different) are going to get hit worse and worse with public sector damage.