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."

Comments

Act against technologies?

[Bill Dimm]

...nation states should be able to act against technologies in countries being used as a platform for attack...

So, nuke Redmond?

shooting the messenger

[Speare]

Just take punitive action against the platform being used to attack, says Chertoff.

Just like we took punitive action against Logan Airport and United Airlines for 9/11? Oh, right.

When "our adversary" uses the likes of Google or Akamai or British Telecom against us in a cyberattack, we're going to return fire on those platforms?

Hey, I'm putting a scheme together about the RIAA...

"Cyber"

[Dystopian Rebel]

"Cyber" is the vague sort of word that Government Management uses in an attempt to sound technologically astute. As soon as you hear a phrase such as "cyber war", you know you are dealing with a management automaton paddling beyond its depth.

It's interesting to note that this term is a back-formation made from "cybernetics":
"From Greek kubernts, governor, from kubernn, to govern."

Makes it sound as though this is another war that being invented by the government to spend the people's money to take the people's freedom away.

Re:False flags abound

[Anonymous Coward]

And that'd be different from the current situation... how?

For once, this is a proposal from the security theater industry that isn't batshit insane. You DDOS us, we null-route the offending nodes, or we politely ask whoever supplies your country with connectivity to do it on our behalf. You DDOS an airline reservation system, stranding millions, and we null-route your country until its uncooperative ISPs learn to play nice. You DDOS an air traffic control system so hard that you actually start killing people, and we not only null-route the country until the dust settles, but we also reserve the right to shut down the offending data center with a LART, presumably in the form of an earth-penetrating mallet. (And we expect that you will do the same to us, if our roles are reversed.)

The present situation is that we run around like chickens with our heads cut off, make vague fearmongering sounds about "what if", and apply for increased funding. That'll happen too, but at least this way there'll be some ground rules as to what sort of retaliation is permissible. Go ahead and spy on us (if we catch you, we'll block you). Try to poke at us (but don't do much damage) and we'll get annoyed. Break our toys, and we'll break your toys. Do collateral damage, and the gloves come off.

Ahahahah! Fools!

[gweihir]

Seems to me these people still do not understand the threat. This is not warfare. It is vandalism, petty theft, corporate espionage and maybe some extortion. You cannot fight crime of this sort with a cold-war strategy. Several reasons:

• It is hard to identify the enemy, and when you do it will often be single individuals and very small organizations
• The enemy is not afraid of counterattacks, since it does not have a similar infrastructure
• The enemy is often hiding behind stolen identities (for example hacked servers), so the risk of hitting the wrong target is very, very high
• This conflict is hugely asymmetrical in that the attacker has very low costs and the counterattacker has very high cost
• Different from the cold war, it is not two huge organizations against each other, but large organizations against a huge number of individuals

This strikes me as basically an over-aggressive, "bully"-type strategy by people that like to employ violence, but are not very bright. It is doomed to fail from the onset. The situation is a bit similar to the "war on terror", but more like a "war on (petty) Internet crime". Fighting crime with military means has never worked and will never work. The way to fight crime is by I) better securing your property (but especially the government and military seems to be hugely incompetent in that area) and II) standard police work. The added complication is that this is an international problem, something the US is notoriously bad at tackling, since they do not understand the rest of the world at all. But bombing shoplifters is not something that is going to work, ever, and even not very bright people should be able to understand that.

Re:False flags abound

[DarkOx]

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.

Of course it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrorism is only scary to people who shouldn't have been let past the third grade. Even irrational people understand their risk of death by terrorism is pretty much nil, compared to say their risk of horrible death involving decapitation and other hilarious ends while driving.

"Cybersecurity", though?

Computers are strange, wondrous magic boxes for the vast majority of the population. Even for the supposed tech whiz 'next generation'. Oh, sure, kids these days understand Twitter. They sure as hell don't understand TCP/IP. What better platform, then, to force Americans to do what we do best? Wet our pants in baseless fear and beg our government to strip us of our freedom.

OH NOES OSAMA IS WHISTLIN' INTO A PHONE AND LAUNCHING NOOKS FROM SATELLITES! :O SAVE ME, GOVERNMENT!

*sigh*

My Proposal

[Hoi Polloi]

I propose ignoring Chertoff.