Why The US Will Lose a Cyber War

An anonymous reader writes "There's not another nation in the world that can wage kinetic warfare as effectively as the United States, and that's probably at the heart of the reason why the United States will lose a war fought in cyberspace, leading cyber security analyst Jeffrey Carr writes."

Comments

We *CAN* win, if we treat our soldiers well!

[Dr.Bob,DC]

I've written about cyber warfare before and made some insightful points.

The bottom line is this: We *CAN* win at cyber war but what we must do is ensure our warriors are comfortable and well nourished as they enter the battlefield. When a warrior is scheduled to go online, make sure they get a well balanced meal the night before. Lower carbohydrates and plenty of protein, preferably from vegan sources. For breakfast a high protein meal is a must, perhaps with some fair trade coffee lightened with a hint of organic soy milk. Some vitamin B complex and Omega 6 fatty acids will also help the brain stay alert during his mission.

That's the nourishment side. Now to comfort.

Low level, indirect lighting. High contrast, high refresh monitors at a distance that helps reduce the amount of EMR the soldier absorbs. Comfortable Pro Shiatsu massage chairs to keep the blood from pooling up in the back and torso.

On of the most important things is the soldiers' nervous system care. If they are to be sitting at a computer all day long, they *must* have proper care both before and after their missions. I'd recommend an on-staff Chiropractor to break out the micro-subluxations that will inevitably form during the hours sitting in a chair. Even a good massage chair will let some develop, but they won't be serious if attended to within reasonable time. The last thing we want is a great cyber warrior crippled by subluxation (or worse, given cancer or heart disease by one) Chiropractic is by far the cheapest method of this. That's why we are petitioning the Veterans' Association to bring us on board in their long term care facilities. We can extend their lives and make the duration better quality.

Take care,
Bob

Re:We *CAN* win, if we treat our soldiers well!

[Denogh]

I'm not really sure why you keep at it, Bob. These folks on /. are far to enamored with their germ theory of disease, and their scientific method, and their actual evidence that science based medicine lengthens lives and cures (or mitigates) diseases and their double blind studies and all the other things that are on their side.

Of course, you and I know the truth. All these polio-free children running around today are the beneficiaries of chiropractic. Likewise, all the smallpox-free children, Diphtheria-free children and malaria-free children. Boy, what would we do without chiropractic?

Re:We *CAN* win, if we treat our soldiers well!

[Lumpy]

The military have used EMF proof glass in their LCD monitors at the Pentagon and Chaney Mountain for years. Your research is based on old information and technology.

Today the Cyber Soldier is housed in a gel immersion tank to simulate a weightless environment and has an array of no fewer that 4 projectors creating a 180 degree display. These projectors use 4 DLP chips designed for military use to eliminate any possible EMF or side band splatter making our Cyber Army nearly immune to any attack. Couple this with the light yellow tinted Revision Cybertactics Protective eyeware it eliminates strain and increases coordination by at least 27.685% over traditional outdated tactics like you talk about. The wavlet generator in the gel does sub-dermal massage to increase their comfort and the air permeable gel allows a constant air flow to keep them at a perfectly comfortable temperature.

Also The Government has been testing on the ground troops the effectiveness of special energy drinks designed for this task Codename RIP-IT with some light Civilian testing as well to make sure the psychotropic side effects are controllable This creates a perfect nourshment system that gives them high carb energy drinks for morning after their high protien slurry feeding. Although some of them prefer the bar form instead of the slurry. All of this makes each soldier able to fight on the Cyber Warfront for at least 9 hours at a time. More dedicated soldiers accept the colostomy bag and urine tube to stay in the fight for days at a time. WE are working on better solutions for waste evacuation that are more comfortable for the soldier, NASA claims to have a solid waste sucker that only causes pinching discomfort for about 6 seconds while it extracts the waste.

This has created a unstoppable force with one exception. the test unit of 12 team members were highly effective until their DSL connection at the pentagon was DDOS attacked. The Government is asking for Congressional funding to get more DSL lines installed but the current Tea-Party members are claiming that it is an un-needed expense.

It just works like that

[zget]

Large empires have always fallen when new technologies have arisen. They allow someone else to take the new number one place. China is extremely viable candidate for this, even without the whole cyberwar thing.

Re:It just works like that

[Anonymous Coward]

China has their own problems. For one they are tied to the U.S. financially. They are in the hopes that we will repay all that debt.

Cyberspace has that odd dependency that we call real-life. Drop the connection and the servers and cyberspace disappears... Question becomes who is willing to do that.

Cyber warfare is not the next battle ground. At best it is the next street fight. Yeah China or some country may break into some company or government computer, but hell we have 16 year old doing that as well. We also have companies that are stopping such attacks on their networks. No the next battle ground is the economy (some might even argue it has always been the battleground). Cyberspace is a nice distraction.

As they say "It's the economy stupid."

Re:It just works like that

[FudRucker]

drop a nuke on, or near, above the carrier & carrier group and problem solved

Re:It just works like that

[cavreader]

China has increased it's import of food by a factor of 5 from the US just over the past 6 years. On the other hand China makes nothing the US can not produce domestically or import from other emerging countries who can also pay their employees a dollar a day to create cheap products. China has also started reporting trade deficits and inflation is driving their export prices up past the point where their currency manipulations can control. Doing anything to really piss off the US would threaten 30% of their current export market while the US might see a slight increase in prices for imported goods.

Re:It just works like that

[delinear]

I don't think anyone is "rooting" for the Chinese government - I think people are more likely hoping the advances the Chinese government are making will be a wake up call to western governments which have coasted arrogantly along for too long. That, or they're just realists (the modern way to win civilization seems not to be through warfare but by ensuring every other country is too dependent on you to go it alone).

Re:It just works like that

[Svartalf]

Heh... China's reason for being "sole source" on those is more because they're cheaper than anyone else. The second largest known deposit, nearly as big as China's is in the US- and the people that own the mine have gotten permits to start back up. Nice try, but no cigar.

No, it's because the U.S. has the most to lose

[elrous0]

The problem with defending the U.S. in a cyber attack is that there are so many targets and its economy has become so utterly and completely dependent on the internet and its computer systems. They're a very easy target because there are so MANY targets to hit there. Now, contrast that with a place like North Korea, which has almost no internet infrastructure and whose ragged economy probably wouldn't take a hit if every computer in the country exploded tomorrow. That's asymetric warfare taken to the nth degree. North Korea in that situation basically CAN'T loose a cyber war against the U.S. The worst that could happen is that the U.S. would stop their attack. And with enough attacks, one is bound to connect. And even one successful attack on an important sector or piece of infrastructure could produce chaos in the U.S.'s very large and powerful house of cards.

In comparison, what has North Korea got to lose? Their few power plants are running on 50's tech. Most of the country lives in abject poverty with no electricity (much less internet access). They're like Battlestar Galactica, a ship with such old technology that a computer virus doesn't even phase them. How the hell is the U.S. going to fight a cyber war against them and NOT lose?

Now, that's an extreme example. China, Russia, Iran, et. al. are a little more dependent on their network/computer infrastructure than North Korea. But NO ONE (outside of the first world, certainly) is as dependent on their IT infrastructure as the U.S. That's a real vulnerability that's almost impossible to plug.

Re:No, it's because the U.S. has the most to lose

[Anonymous Coward]

Which is why, if the US is blatently attacked, they will respond with troops and bombs instead of cyber retaliation.

Cyber attack is already a routine reality; it's not some kind of looming futuristic threat. And yet the troops aren't being deployed and the bombs not being dropped, because no one knows how to do that and where to bomb.

I would envision a typical response to be either cutting off the Internet connections from an attacking country (by physically destroying the cables with air strikes)

This countermeasure definitely isn't viable, because the main mode of cyber attack is insurgency. The first step of cyber attack is to have your adversary attack itself. The US isn't going to cut off access to itself. Indeed, persuading the US to do that, could in fact be the very goal of the attacker, so your suggested defense is in fact surrender.

i.e. The purpose of the president's "Internet kill switch" to destroy the US economy, in the event that the US economy is threatened. It's pretty damn funny, almost right out of Dr. Strangelove.

Re:No, it's because the U.S. has the most to lose

[GooberToo]

Power is unreliable and blackouts happen several times a day.

Sadly, you just described portions of the US too. Even worse, this will become ever more common over the next decade. If left unchecked, and utility companies are not required to maintain and repair the equipment they've already been paid *twice* to do so, within two decades the US will have a second world power infrastructure. The peak reliability for the US power grid was in the 1970s. Its been at a steady decline ever since even though our utility rates (and lump sum government payments via taxes) have literally paid to do it properly twice now.

Re:No, it's because the U.S. has the most to lose

[plover]

Thanks for the spoiler douche... I haven't seen the show yet, just put it in my Netflix queue a month or so ago, and now at least one episode is already ruined!!

grumble grumble grumble

More spoilers: Lucifer kidnaps Boxey and tries to force Adama to surrender the fleet, but Daggit helps him escape while Starbuck and Apollo fly in to rescue him.

Look, the show was over 30 years ago. If you haven't seen it by now, it's not our problem.

Re:No, it's because the U.S. has the most to lose

[GooberToo]

Why was a factually accurate, polite, non-adversarial post troll moderated?

sigh

[hypergreatthing]

no such thing as a cyber war. If i were to guess, it would be koreans who win a cyber war because they're pros are starcraft. The US might be able to win at halo though, so it would be some sort of give and take.

Re:sigh

[geekmux]

no such thing as a cyber war...

I used to believe that, but not any longer. And if you still struggle to believe in this, then I challenge YOU to go without any form of electronic communication for one week. Let's see how you, as an individual, fares without email, internet, or even a cell phone. You'll likely find yourself at "war" with yourself after a few days.

Going to school? Good luck enrolling in classes or communicating with teachers.

Looking for a job? Gonna be kind of hard to do that today on foot, sans any type of electronic communication. Do you even have a hard copy of your resume? Wait, don't tell me, let me guess, it's online.

Going to work? Go see how productivity drops when email and internet are down, regardless if they're actually needed to do your job or not.

I wonder what would ultimately have the larger impact on the US; someone cutting off all access to foreign oil, or someone cutting off access to the internet? I'll bet if you asked the majority of your friends, they would give up a car before they would give up a cell phone or internet access.

Bottom line is yes, there is such a thing as cyber war, and yes, it would have a significant impact on almost everyone, personally and professionally. It's a sad state of affairs, but it is the burden of dependency that we've built up over the last couple of decades.

Re:sigh

[plover]

Your personal ability to surf the web and register for classes is probably not the primary target of a cyberwar opponent. Taking down an ISP or two and preventing home internet services for a week would be a show that might get mentioned on the evening news, but would not really damage our economy. The GP posted some poor examples, and you fell for his trolling.

Real cyberwar would likely be attacks taking place on targets anywhere in our infrastructure. Perhaps the attackers could disrupt the cellular network, which would shut down all kinds of businesses. They could take out some key backbone network providers: look at the problems businesses are having with their internet connectivity now that the Verizon workers are on strike. They could take down the stock exchange servers, preventing trading and causing panic in the marketplace; and if movie plots are to be believed, they could cash in on the timing of the predicted fluctuations, wiping out real banks in the process.

Many years ago when mainframe computers roamed the earth, I read an estimate that an average business could survive relatively well without its computer systems for a day or three, but seven days would cause lasting damage, and an outage of longer than 15 days would cause them to go bankrupt. Well, the network itself is just as critical in today's distributed environment, but our dependencies upon that information have grown exponentially since that estimate was made. You can't put diesel fuel in a truck's fuel tank without a computer authorization to turn on the pumps. FedEx and UPS couldn't ship a single package without their systems. Retail stores couldn't tell you what they sold, what to reorder, or even authorize your debit card to buy your groceries. Passengers and luggage would back up in terminals around the globe if the flight systems went down.

And none of this is talking about attacks on SCADA systems. An attacker could shut down chemical, electrical, or even nuclear facilities. They could damage gas pipelines, or luggage belts in airports, or even cause the stoplights on streets to fall back to default blinking red mode. Just think about throwing all of Chicago or New York into an uncontrollable gridlock. Look at Stuxnet for an example.

Sure, taking out a handful of random routers is going to do nothing. But taking out the specific handful of routers that send traffic to FedEx corporate headquarters or to Comdata's fuel control systems would have a bit more of an impact.

Re:sigh

[cforciea]

Really, your attack vector on phones is turning off the AC so that the switches run a little hot and have a few percentage points higher of a failure rate? I'm not sure if that's more or less funny than the concept of an explode button on the scada interface for key pieces of our electric infrastructure.

I'm not saying that somebody can't do damage to us via internet connectivity, but I think you've watching Live Free or Die Hard a few too many times or something.

Is it me or is the article a load of bollocks

[Chrisq]

Is it me or is the article a load of bollocks? "The Chinese will win because the I Ching teaches them synchronicity"! Haven't soldiers consistently exhibited synchronicity? The "gut feeling" that a valley is unsafe. The WWI idea that the "third light" was unlucky, so they extinguished the match after lighting two - years before someone figured out that the time to light three cigarettes was just long enough for a sniper to notice, aim, and fire!

Also, It will take a lot to convince me that synchronicity is of primary importance in a cyber-war. We are not talking about pursuing agents through second life, we are talking about finding weaknesses in web-connected devices that control infrastructure, and viruses that will make the centrifuges in a uranium processing plant wear out. I think the author is talking complete bollocks.

Re:Is it me or is the article a load of bollocks

[ugen]

mod this up. the "article" is a complete hog-wash. if anything, author just wanted to show-off a shiny new word he found, and do it in a way that attracts attention

Re:Is it me or is the article a load of bollocks

[MuValas]

Is it me or is the article a load of bollocks? "The Chinese will win because the I Ching teaches them synchronicity"!

Agreed. I got to the end and the author just loses it: The "West" will lose because we're the West and the Chinese have a superior way of thinking. There was almost nothing of substance in the article except the very end: "

The decision to call cyberspace a domain was based on organizational necessity. That’s how the Defence Department is set up. It’s how budgets are created and funds distributed. It’s how contracts get assigned. Simply put, it’s how things get done at the Pentagon. This is why the United States will lose a war fought in cyberspace. A strategic doctrine built upon a flawed vision can’t yield a victory against an adversary whose knowledge of the battle space is superior to our own."

If he would've just expanded on that idea instead, it would have been much more informative. Pulling a "the chinese have a mystical way of thinking that we can not replicate!" is just dumb.

What a load of tosh

[FhnuZoag]

"The information that circulates in CST is every bit as material as a chair, a car, or a quantum particle. Electromagnetic waves are just as material as the earth from which the calculi were made: it is simply that their degrees of materiality are different. In modern physics matter is associated with the complex relationship: substance-energy-information-space-time. The semantic shift from material to immaterial is not merely naive, for it can lead to dangerous fantasies."

Now there's plenty of reasonable ways to talk about US weaknesses in cyber warfare (which IMHO is commonly overstated: what seems like weakness can often be a strength. It may merely be the case that the US is more subtle about its cyber shenanigans), but this article seems to meander into complete incoherence. Jung's synchronicity? I Ching? Seriously? Seems like someone's watched too much Serial Experiments Lain.

Re:What a load of tosh

[dkf]

"The information that circulates in CST is every bit as material as a chair, a car, or a quantum particle. Electromagnetic waves are just as material as the earth from which the calculi were made: it is simply that their degrees of materiality are different. In modern physics matter is associated with the complex relationship: substance-energy-information-space-time. The semantic shift from material to immaterial is not merely naive, for it can lead to dangerous fantasies."

Now there's plenty of reasonable ways to talk about US weaknesses in cyber warfare (which IMHO is commonly overstated: what seems like weakness can often be a strength. It may merely be the case that the US is more subtle about its cyber shenanigans), but this article seems to meander into complete incoherence. Jung's synchronicity? I Ching? Seriously?

Guess it's all fixable by attaching special crystals ($599+tax each) to the DOD's computers, and having everyone sitting in a circle, holding hands and chanting "Omm" or whatever woowoo is being pushed this week.

Needs more cowbell, err, quantum.

Enormous Piece of Shit

[dcollins]

Regardless of whether or not the U.S. would win a cyberwar (or even if such a thing exists), the article makes no testable or even clear assertions on any such thing. It's all about Carl Jung and "interconnectedness" and mind/body material/immaterial synchronicity and at root:

"The Book of Changes or Yijing. It’s a divinatory oracle that dates back to the Qin dynasty and teaches that the universe is composed of parts that are interconnected. The yarrow stalks used in the Yijing symbolize those parts, while the casting of them symbolizes the mystery of how the universe works (Pauli's quantum indeterminacy). Chinese emperors and generals have used this oracle since approximately 300 BC, and it may still provide a glimmer of insight into the mysterious nature of this new age of cyber-space-time and how cyber battles may be fought and won. Unfortunately for Western nations, synchronicity has its origins in the East. Western nations have a tradition in causality, not synchronicity. And the US Defense Department is deeply grounded in traditional western thinking and practicality..."

Seriously, this article makes the argument that the DOD doesn't understand cyberspace because it spends insufficient time casting stalks and reading from a 2,300-year-old book of divinations. Made my eyes roll so hard it hurt my head. Possibly the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever seen on Slashdot. Yeah, the DOD is just too "practical" (insufficiently magical?), there's your argument.

Re:Enormous Piece of Shit

[Baloroth]

I think his point is that the DoD is thinking about cyberwarfare wrongly. To do this, he invokes a psychoanalyst and psychoanalytic principles and attempts to connect them to the Internet.

He fails. The Internet is not some new form of "cyber-space-time". It is a massive repository of information, connected by wires (mostly) and run by computers according to the rules we have established. Its complexity does not make it something new. It is no more a new field of "space-time" than Conway's Game of Life is. Using psychoanalysis to talk about it is, frankly, somewhat ridiculous and makes me question just how much of a "leading analyst" he is.

Re:This is dumb

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

If shit really truly hits the fan, you unplug.

What makes you think there aren't sleeping botnets designed to attack in the event of prolonged disconnection from country X?

we already had a cyber attack. remember Enron?

[decora]

they shut down the power grids, by twiddling some bits in a computer, and laughing about grannies who would be without power.

of course they got away with it, because they were well connected politically and ideologically to the 'free market uber alles' people.

you could also argue the financial crisis of 2008 was a cyber attack on the part of the bankers, hedge fund managers, ratings agencies, insurance companies, and government regulators who all colluded to create massive fraud of the Synthetic CDO "industry", which wiped out vast mountains of money ... all using little numbers in computers, swishing things to the Cayman Islands and so forth.

It also ignores an important part of "cyber war"

[Sycraft-fu]

That would be the "war" part. These silly little hacking games that go on all the time, even if they have a government behind them, are not cyber war. They don't cause any real amount of trouble, don't advance any strategic objective. They are a nuisance more or less. Real "cyber war" would be like any other war in that the objective would be to hurt an enemy.

Ok well two things to keep in mind about that:

1) In such a case, the US would probably take more drastic measures. It would be easier than you think for them to cut off all Internet in and out of the US. That would work for the moment to keep things secure. They then could set about cutting the cables to the attacking country, via sub, bombs, etc. Once that country was off the net, they re-enable their link back to the world. That a cyber attack can be shut down by turning off routers or cutting cables means its long term effectiveness is rather limited.

2) It is a war which means that it will be responded to as such, namely with physical force. If a nation started destroying US infrastructure by hacking, you think the US government would really sit back and say "Oh well it is cyber, so we have to just use computers in response."? Hell no, they'd start blowing shit up. See how well that cyber war goes when stealth bombers take out your power grid, your telecom centers, and so on.

There would be no "cyber" war, there would be real war.

Also in general it seems the government is reasonably well prepared for such a thing by virtue of having their own private systems for a lot of stuff. The government has its own phone system, its own internets, and so on. They were created for other reasons (the phone system because the PSTN got slammed when Kennedy was killed and the government wanted communications that couldn't get interrupted like that, the internets for security against espionage) but they also have the fairly useful function of limiting the damage someone could do to the government and military with a cyber attack. It isn't like a hacker could go and turn off NORAD or something.

Finally, who the fuck is this guy? A "leading cyber security analyst"? Only according to himself. He is the "CEO" of some shit company who's site doesn't appear to have a functional domain, just an IP, and that is run in Wordpress. The guy is just trying to use scare tactics to sell worthless shit to CEOs. Slashdot shouldn't publish crap like this.

Mind the gap

[petes_PoV]

Bomber gap, missile gap, mineshaft gap, Dr. Strangelove gap.

This is just another example of either someone who's feeling a little insecure or is trying to exploit the insecurity of others for their own ends.

Both strategies have a long tradition in the USA and all the defence related FUD has been found to be baseless when the truth leaks out (usually against the wishes of the govt/military).

Ultimately there is absolutely no need to fight a cyber war. if the USA was ever attacked, the most effective defence would simply be to pull the plug on all incoming/outgoing IP traffic. Most americans simply wouldn't notice (except when the amount of SPAM decreased, or their favourite porn sites became inaccessible) and for most facilities that are targets for attack, there's no legitimate reason to have them exposed to the internet anyway.

A connecting principle of BS

[jjohn]

Whether or not the US is adequately prepared for "cyberwar" is certainly an open question.

However, this article is riddled with neologism ("cyber-space-time" really?) and magical
thinking (e.g. I Ching, synchronicity).

If the Internet really isn't a hardware-software system, what is it? Why not claim it has a soul too
and that we should sing to it?

The real issue is that the Internet infrastructure is public resource controlled by private interests.
That's what makes the DoD's job of defending it difficult. Defense cannot simply issue edicts like
"upgrade all your router firmware right now."

I do not propose we retreat back to a paper-based information system. I propose we go back to clay tablets.

Re:This is dumb

[hypergreatthing]

what makes you think there are? cuz the boogie man told you?
This is all just scare tactics and fear mongering to get people to spend money on a non existent problem. After all the terrorists have been defeated (lol) we need a new enemy to focus on. Might as well start looking around, spending money on cyber security sounds just as good as spending money on a missle defense shield or star wars program circa 1980s.

We won't lose the war, we'll lose the first battle

[divisionbyzero]

And then in typical American reactive manner we'll dump a bunch of money into cybersecurity and thereby create the military-IT complex...

Sargent! What the hell is wrong with that missile

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I would envision a typical response to be either cutting off the Internet connections from an attacking country (by physically destroying the cables with air strikes), or pinpointing the location of the attackers and turning them into red mist.

Well, since the attackers would be a BotNet of compromised XP PCs located all over the US mainland, I don't think that would be effective. But I could certainly see some bonehead launching cruse missiles, then wondering why they appear to be circling back to base.

The Cult of the Mysterious Cyberspacetime

[cipher42]

The author seems to be of the opinion that cyberspace is some strange and mysterious entity that is beyond the ken of standard reasoning. From his comparisons to the I-Ching (aka Yi Jing) and Jung's synchronicity, it appears that he approaches cyberspace from an almost religious perspective (the only other alternative being that he approaches it from the perspective of bad pop science...). He even goes so far as advocating the new name of "cyberspacetime" to wrap the idea in even another layer of mystery (obfuscation?). That he buys into this strange idea is bad enough, but then he decides to criticize the DoD because they don't share this outlandish view. I'm just happy that he's not the one making national security decisions.

Very narrow vision

[maverickjesterx]

I have worked in several countries in IT, specifically IT security. The author clearly sees things only from one perspective. Other nations IT capabilities especially within small to medium companies is very limited with IT staff's that have very limited experience. This is not to say all countries but many. The problem of IT security is not just a U.S. problem but globally IT security is a mess. Think about this: in Austria a very small European the television is state run and you pay a tax. That state run company was just hacked a few weeks ago and every Austrian that has a TV is a customer so they all lost personal data to hackers. Birthday, bank information if they paid with a bank or credit card. Full name and address and etc...... Yes the U.S. has a problem but so does every country out there. Personally I am concerned about all security.

Re:well seeing how bad the rail system is that fai

[ender-]

well seeing how bad the rail system is that may fail on it's own.

I'm not sure the US is in any position to criticize the rail system of any other nation. :)

Re:It also ignores an important part of "cyber war

[PraiseBob]

1) In such a case, the US would probably take more drastic measures. It would be easier than you think for them to cut off all Internet in and out of the US.

And what kind of economic damage does that cause? How difficult would it be for a country to sneak in a few dozen agents and electronic equipment to within US borders? How much damage can they cause if they already have hidden backdoors into multiple infrastructure sites that have been dormant? Cutting off the net from the world for one day would cost millions of dollars. Cutting of the net internally would cost billions. A few cars full of guys out wardriving could remain undetected a long time. The choice is between leaving networks off and costing millions/billions of dollars a day, and turning it back on and having a sleeper agent damage something. Your entire premise is based on geography, which really doesn't apply.

2) It is a war which means that it will be responded to as such, namely with physical force.

Hey look, a bunch of attacks came from China, we better bomb China? Except oh maybe those were re-routed from Iran, or Russia, and set the Chinese up. How can you be certain the country you are about to bomb is running the attacks and isn't a victim themselves? Do you really think the nation initiating the attacks wouldn't do everything in their power to remain undetected and blame somebody else?

It isn't like a hacker could go and turn off NORAD or something.

This isn't a conventional war though, why would they care about NORAD? Shutting down the power grid for 1 day in 1 metropolis would cost billions of dollars to the economy. How many hits like that can this economy take? How much uncertainty about cyber attacks will the market bear before foreign investors seek safer places and send the economy into a complete tailspin? Look at the fall of the USSR for instance. It had nothing to do with losing in battle, and everything to do with money.

We could psychoanalyze the hell out of this...

[istartedi]

.We could psychoanalyze the hell out of this, or we could air-gap the stuff that really matters and be done with it.