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?

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.

My Proposal

[Hoi Polloi]

I propose ignoring Chertoff.